[This piece is appearing in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) where I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012, running under the slogan “Truth. For a change.”]
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Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Apparently, though, you can fool enough people enough of the time that we in America have a serious problem dealing rationally with reality.
This problem goes way deeper than Donald Trump, though he is likely the greatest purveyor of falsehoods in the history of the world. The Lie in American politics has been dangerously great since well before Trump’s Big Lies. (That the 2020 election was stolen, when it was Trump himself trying to steal the Election. And that he’s being prosecuted for political reasons, when right in front of the American people Trump committed the most serious crimes in our nation’s history -- compelling the American system of justice to hold Trump accountable.)
The way a mass shooting ruined Kansas City’s celebratory day reminds us of another destructive falsehoods: the notion that reasonable regulation of guns in our nation would threaten all our liberties.
The falsehood of the idea that the Second Amendment is the necessary guarantor of all our other rights is obvious: the world is full of societies that regulate guns in reasonable ways and remain as free as ours.
The use of that falsehood – by the Republican Party, and its ally the NRA – to prevent our nation from finding a sane balance between individual rights and public safety, results in the unnecessary death every year of tens of thousands of Americans from gun violence.
A falsehood that kills people.
Even more destructive, for the long term, has been the Republicans’ continuous injection – into our politics -- of utter falsehoods on climate change. It’s almost 30 years since I was on TV, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, debating the chair of the Republican Party about what was then called “global warming.” Even then, virtually the whole cadre of climate scientists throughout the world were raising the alarm that the gasses we’d been spewing into the atmosphere were disrupting the earth’s climate, and that urgent action was needed. But my interlocutor told our mostly Republican audience that “the science is not settled,” and that it would be foolish to do anything to protect the future of human civilization.
It is a sign of how bad our politics of falsehood are that for some years, the Republican Party has been the only conservative party among the world’s democracies that has responded to climate change – which many experts regard as the most serious challenge ever faced by humankind – through outright denial of the scientifically well-established truth.
A falsehood that magnifies a potential global catastrophe.
A Republican friend of mine – a wonderfully good-hearted man, and smart – recently declared to me (while praising the massive tax cut for the rich the Republicans passed in 2017) that “Supply-side economics really works!” I know he was sincere, but it’s a mystery how he could believe that.
Three times in the past forty-some years, we’ve seen how this “supply-side” economics nonsense – the idea that cutting taxes (it’s always on the rich and the corporate system) will generate more revenue for the government.
- It began with Reagan. After running on a platform of cutting our national debt, he used supply-side economics to justify a big tax cut (in 1981). And lo and behold, that debt nearly tripled during his presidency.
- Next came George W. Bush. When he took office in 2001, the U.S. (under Clinton) had been running budget surpluses for several years, and projections were that would continue as far as the eye could see. Asserting that supply-side economics would make the tax cut Bush wanted work just fine, Bush got his tax cut through Congress. The budget surpluses immediately disappeared, and under W the national debt almost doubled.
- The final Republican President to use the fallacious supply-side idea to cut taxes on Big Money was Donald Trump (in 2017). As usual, the Republicans claimed that their massive give-away to the Money Power would more than pay for itself. And once again, on the contrary, Trump added almost $8 trillion to the national debt.
Yet my Republican friend had been persuaded by his party that “Supply side economics really works!”
A falsehood that repeatedly has widened the gulf of inequality of wealth, taking from those who have less to enrich still further those who have the most.
Another important falsehood has to do with the role of race in America – historically, and in the present. The Republican world has argued vociferously that there is no “systemic racism” in America. It would be hard to comprehend major aspects of American history if the role of racism were left out. But the continuing reality of that problem is surely demonstrated by the incontrovertible fact that black parents feel it vital to coach their sons on how to behave when pulled over by a police officer, lest they might end up dead, while white parents feel no such need.
A falsehood that erects a barrier to mutual understanding between the races.
This list -- of falsehoods that prevent many Americans from seeing reality clearly -- could be extended almost indefinitely.
And each of those falsehoods could readily be shown to damage our world.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
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Please check out a selected group of “Messages to the Conservatives” I’ve been sending out through my weekly op/ed pieces.
I’d like to invite you also to explore my BETTER HUMAN STORY, an integrated picture of the forces that need to be brought under control for human civilization to survive for the long haul— a picture that also clarifies the nature of the crisis in the United States in these times as Fascism threatens the survival of American Democracy.
Also, my efforts in the last several months to convey that same multi-dimensional understanding of the dynamics that plague the world of the civilization-creating species through YouTube videos, found here. (Please consider subscribing to my YouTube Channel.)