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The importance of actually being fact-based [1]

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Date: 2023-09-20  

We live in a troubling, and unusual, time in American history, when one of the two major political parties has pretty much abandoned any pretense of caring about facts, and has instead adopted an Orwellian approach where “truth” is whatever the Party says is truth. And the Party is mostly controlled by one would-be dictator who can be compared variously to a two-year-old tantrum-thrower, a middle school bully, a snake-oil-selling con man, or a Mafia don. Sometimes all at once. (Not very long ago, this accusation would have been dismissed by intelligent Independents as partisan hyperbole, but today the statement itself is an objective fact.)

This abandonment of any pretense of Truth is not quite the same thing as mere “lying.” Most people believe—and I agree—that all politicians lie sometimes, many lie frequently, and political party alone is a not usually a reliable indicator of how much lying can be expected. Or at least party was not a major determiner in the past. But things are different today. The nature of the lies is different today from what it was in the past. What those older lies usually had in common was that they were either so overblown that they could not be taken seriously by most people (“If my opponent is elected, he will crash and burn the entire economy with his crazy Marxist ideas!”) or else they were intended either to actually be believed, or at least not be susceptible to being disproved in a court of law. (“I am not a crook.” Nixon tried that. It didn’t work, but he meant for it to work.)

But today the lies coming from the Far Right constantly remind me of old-style Soviet propaganda, such as when the Soviet Union publicly stated, following the Soviet army’s entrance into Hungary to quell the threat of rebellion in 1956: “On the request of the Hungarian People’s Government the Soviet Government consented to the entry into Budapest of the Soviet Army units to assist the Hungarian People’s Army and the Hungarian authorities to establish order in the town.” [self-evident sarcasm emphasized. The real reason the Soviet army moved in was simply to crush the impending rebellion against the Soviet-controlled Hungarian government before it got out of hand.]

That kind of Soviet propaganda was what I would remember whenever I heard Trump or one of his spokesmen say ridiculous—and easily disproved—things, such as that the 2017 Inauguration Day celebration had the largest crowds for any Inauguration Day ever (easily-accessed photos showed that it was much smaller than either of Obama’s Inauguration Day crowds, and was in fact closer to being the smallest ever rather than the largest). His lying simply took no notice whatever of any evidence to the contrary, no matter how easy that evidence was to find. His followers were expected to go along because their Leader said so, not because what he said was factual. And now even the more “respectable” members of the Republican party support Trump for purely pragmatic reasons: not because they believe Trump’s lies, but because they want the votes of the people who do believe those lies.

But before we get too outraged at the way that so many Republicans are supporting what they personally do not believe in, it might be good to remember that such behavior is not aberrant, but rather has been the norm throughout human history. People have always supported their leaders because they were their leaders. The idea of holding one’s own leaders to some standard of objective truth seems to be a fairly recent development in human history, although it has roots in the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament). When Alexander set out to conquer the near East, nobody in Greece protested that imperialism was morally wrong. (And even today Alexander is viewed by a typical Westerner as Good because he was one of Us, unlike Attila the Hun, who was evil because he was one of Them.) That didn’t change much through time; when Napoleon began the conquest of Europe in 1803, we have no record of any significant objections within France itself.

In America, on the other hand, attitudes took a different turn. Although “Manifest Destiny” was generally accepted, and the Mexican war of 1846 was popular with the majority of Americans (as the Spanish-American War of 1898 would also be), there were some voices, including Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s, that were raised in opposition. Lincoln in particular opposed President Polk by questioning whether Polk’s account of the triggering incident of the Mexican War actually took place on American soil as Polk claimed. By doing this, Lincoln was attempting to use the idea of Objective Fact as a legitimate reason to oppose one’s own Leader. Of course he—and other dissenting Whigs—were called traitors by the pro-war Democrats of that day, but that did not stop him from appealing to factual evidence.

This willingness to appeal to Fact to oppose one’s leaders reached perhaps its high point during the Vietnam War, with the widespread anti-war protests, along with pivotal events such as the freeing of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that certain key events, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, did not happen the way they were reported.

Since then, however, the older ways have reasserted themselves. Consider this portion of an article written by Heather Cox Richardson on August 11 of this year:

It seems we are reaping the fruits of the political system planted in 1968, when the staff of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon reworked American politics to package their leader for the election. “Voters are basically lazy,” one of Nixon’s media advisors wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand. . .When we argue with him, we. . .seek to engage his intellect. . . The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

And, as is heavily implied even though not expressly stated, “reason” depends upon facts to support the reasoning. And it was precisely the weakening of fact-based reasoning that led to the popularity of both Nixon (until Watergate) and his Republican successors. So, when “supply-side economics” as justified with the “Laffer Curve” did not in fact result in an increase in tax revenue and a reduction in the federal deficit—in fact it resulted in an unprecedented explosion in the deficit as tax revenues fell sharply (exactly as predicted by common sense)—nobody seemed to care. And if they didn’t care about the big, obvious things, then they could easily overlook the less obvious facts, such as the reality that Democratic presidential administrations on average have seen performances by the American economy that are somewhat better than that seen by Republican administrations, not worse, as is commonly claimed and feared.

And so now we see a political landscape where one side clearly relies on lies of the most blatant sort, while the other side plausibly claims to be the side of “fact-based” decision-making. I do not know of any previous times in American history when this description of the two sides was as objectively true as it is today. But that brings me to my main point: it is especially important now that Democrats be conscious of what “fact-based” means, and strive to avoid being hypocritical (however unintentionally). Here are just a few of many things that Democrats should be careful about:

1) Do not fight error with equal but opposite error.

To cite just one example among many, Republicans often imply, and occasionally say plainly, that poverty is always caused by the bad attitudes and actions of the poor people. Ergo, those people wouldn’t be poor if they could just get their act together. This assertion qualifies as a lie because it is, I believe, an intentional falsehood, not merely careless and unintentional. The truth is that there are many people who do everything right but still fall into poverty through no fault of their own. However it is equally wrong to say (or imply) that poverty is never the result of bad attitudes and actions. Both “always” and “never” are false generalizations, and Democrats should be careful to acknowledge that the causes of poverty are complex, not simple and one-dimensional. And there are many other such issues where conservatives take a simplistic and absolutist stance which tempts liberals to assert the exact opposite, which may prove to be equally false. This temptation must be avoided.

2) Do not jump to conclusions which may be wrong.

An unfortunate truth about lynch mobs, if I have read the history books correctly, is that they probably got the right person more often than they got the wrong one. But such mobs were still evil because they did often get the wrong person, for the wrong reason. Actions that are hasty and emotion-driven are often wrong. But well-meaning liberals sometimes learn about an emotionally-charged bad event and immediately pick up the metaphorical torches and pitchforks and go after the presumed evildoer. But being right most of the time does not make up for the few times when the condemnation is premature and mistaken. We should always wait until we have the whole story before we start talking as though the issue is already settled.

3) Do not judge credibility solely based on who said it

Sometimes I see on Kos a rebuttal of an opinion expressed as “That’s just a Republican talking point!” Well, it may be, but that does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. It can be very satisfying to repeat the old joke “How can you tell whether (x) is lying? His lips are moving!” but the reality is that Republicans (even Trump himself) are perfectly happy to use true statements if those true statements happen to support their narrative. Therefore you cannot dismiss a statement as false merely because Republicans are repeating it. Every assertion must be judged on its own merits, not on who said it.

I remember reading a few years ago about a survey that purported to ask people whether they agreed or disagreed with various political statements. But the real purpose was different; some people were shown a page where half of the statements were attributed to Donald Trump, and the other half were attributed to Barack Obama. But other people were shown the identical list of statements, except that the attributions were reversed, Obama instead of Trump, and Trump instead of Obama. The results were that people who identified as Republicans or conservatives agreed with “Trump” and disagreed with “Obama” most of the time, while people who identified as Democrats or liberals agreed with “Obama” and disagreed with “Trump” most of the time. That is, the majority of respondents were agreeing or disagreeing with the person who supposedly said it, not with the actual content of the statement. But for people who believe that facts are important, we should be willing to agree or disagree with a statement based on what we, personally, actually believe, not based on who said it.

Being “fact-based” is important, but it isn’t always easy to be consistent. Facts matter, even when (especially when?) they don’t go the way we want them to. But we have to work at being consistent. Otherwise we are no better than the people we criticize.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/20/2194417/-The-importance-of-actually-being-fact-based

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