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Can Our Democracy Survive Without Truthfulness?

Truthfulness is being realistic and true to life. It is the foundation on which democratic politics is supposed to rest. No person or institution has sole authority to determine what is true or real. Yet, confusion, deception and conspiracy theories are often spread by condemning some information as “fake news” or “alternate facts”, making it difficult to find common ground. Yet, it is essential that citizens agree on what reality looks like. Without truthfulness, government will become ineffective and corrupt, leading to inequality and instability that will eventually bring both the collapse of individual freedoms and the government itself.


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In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2024, 91% of Americans said it is essential for someone in high political office to be honest and ethical – the top attribute out of nine asked about in the survey. Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly agree that political leaders should be honest and ethical. But there is far less common ground among partisans over whether particular leaders – including President Donald Trump – display these qualities.


We need a basic and shared understanding about reality so we can grasp what is reasonable, what is dangerous, what is possible and what has happened. Lately, however, even this low-level kind of consensus seems elusive. The issue is not just about political pundits spouting “alternative facts” or the current president bending the truth and spreading conspiracy theories. His goal is to create chaos and stay in the spotlight by making outlandish claims that too many people believe.


The quote “Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it,” is attributed to the Third Reich's propaganda master, Joseph Goebbels. If you then deliver your message loudly and with emotion in the context of basic values as Hitler did, those in your audience will follow you anywhere.


This is advice that President Trump follows relentlessly. During Donald Trump's first term, the Washington Post famously kept count of the lies the president told. The paper's final tally was 30,573 from the time he was inaugurated the first time to when he left office in January of 2021 — an average of 21 lies or misleading statements every day he was in office.


Want to make a lie seem true? Repeat it again and again. Those who claim “fake news” or “alternate facts” about information they don’t like often repeat it over and over. Repeating a lie over and over can make it more believable due to the illusory truth effect, where familiarity with a statement, even if false, leads people to perceive it as more credible. This phenomenon can be exploited for political propaganda or other manipulative purposes. Using your own knowledge and other sources to fact-check can prevent you from believing it is true when it is later repeated.


Today, even hard evidence of the kind that used to settle arguments about factual questions doesn’t persuade people whose political commitments have already led them to the opposite conclusion. Too many citizens now exist in political tribes where one person’s truth is another person’s fake news or brazen lie. Consider, for example, how people leaning left and those leaning right interpret the evidence of global warming. Many people are now convinced that the boundaries between truth and dishonesty are as subjective as everything else. It is all a matter of perception and spin and it doesn’t really matter because no individual, organization, or other entity can be trusted.


The way to counter lies and misinformation is to call them out as lies or misinformation strongly and forcefully, as soon as possible and repeatedly. But, that’s not easy to do because it can take lots of time, money and effort to fact-check dubious claims and broadcast the truth to those who were misled. The longer a lie percolates in the brain of the misinformed before it is refuted, the harder it will be to convince the misinformed of the truth. Besides that, you will be able to reach only a very few of those who were misled or misinformed.


Why are people of different political persuasions lately having so much trouble reaching any broadly shared sense of the world beyond themselves or any consensus on which institutions, methods, or people can be trusted to get us there? Is it any wonder that ultimately so many of us seem simply to have given up on the possibility of finding common ground?


Disruption because of recent developments in media, technology and law, in particular, are culprits. Deregulation of media was jump-started by the Reagan administration’s in the context of radio in the late 1980s and, then, cable TV in the 1990s. Trustworthy “news” turned into a blend of entertainment and partisan slanted news, often with a focus on what could best stir indignation or fear.


Rush Limbaugh and Fox News play a major role in this story. The rise of the Internet and especially social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter further distorted the world of communication and, consequently, truth claims. By lowering the cost of entry and extending everyone’s potential reach to global proportions, social media has produced not the democratization of valuable information but its opposite.


Traditional gatekeepers, such as the national media with their important vetting function, have lost ground to the empowered private, and often anonymous individual, pushing their own biased perspectives. The resulting chaos has been driven by a tsunami of information that sweeps us into online tribes. Consequently, information that is unverified, misleading and blatantly untrue spreads with ease and abandon, and often with undemocratic results.


The free and open exchange of ideas where different viewpoints compete for acceptance can no longer be counted on to bend toward the rational or the true. The functioning of a democratic truth process has been thwarted repeatedly by the efforts of capitalistic or political parties that work to capture the power that comes from being able to define what counts as truth and what does not. The tobacco industry, for example, falsely promoted low-harm versions of their products for decades. Eventually, a federal judge convicted the major tobacco companies on racketeering charges in part because they lied to the public with their health claims. As another example, oil and gas companies have long denied or undermined climate change science. 


Both the failure of compromise to reach consensus and the threat of domination by one part of the population have only grown since the twentieth century, as economic inequality and, consequentially, inequality on the basis of educational attainment and every other measurable manifestation of disparity have expanded unabated. The world looks very different to those elites whose lives are rarely lived in common with the “ordinary folks”. In fact, elites have worked relentlessly to shore up their own wealth and authority even as democracy, and especially suffrage, have formally expanded over the years.


But all that can be righted, according to some, once real people are able to substitute their own version of truth, rooted in faith, instinct and practical experience, not to mention authenticity, for the arcane and self-serving version offered up by the “mainstream” press, the academic establishment and the “deep state” — in short, the various domains of truth elites.


At its best, this insistence on the perceptions of ordinary folk, that is real people, can be a vital corrective to expert arrogance and domination. But when populist rhetoric starts to determine how politics is practiced, the risk becomes again not just bad policy but that an equally undemocratic, anti-pluralistic politics will prevail, this time targeting individuals and groups associated with expertise and technocracy and pushing their dissenting voices out of any broader conversation. Then, the path can be cleared for a demagogic leader to come forward, someone who claims to speak for those real people and their sense of the world better than anyone else can.


Truth matters as the foundation for interpersonal trust. It matters because we cannot talk to one another, much less conduct a serious debate, until we share some principles and facts about the world at large, not to mention a consensus on how to generate them.


Most of all, truth matters as a form of collective hope. By this way of thinking, democracy’s great advantage consists not so much in the obvious outcomes it produces as of the opportunities it affords citizens, who may disagree on much, to try to get things right. Only if we can imagine the possibility of moral and undebatable progress through progress away from lies and propaganda and spin and toward a truer and more consensual view of reality, however elusive — can we begin to narrow the gaps between democratic theory and the world in which we actually live and operate.


We must not give up on trying to find common ground about the nature of reality that we can hold in common. Our individual futures, as well as our global future, depends on living in a shared world.

  

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION SEE: Can Democracy Survive Without Truth?

 

 


 
 
 

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