There’s been a lot of discussion about the proliferation of false claims in political ads and even in candidates’ speeches during this campaign. A story in today’s New York Times suggests that the campaign has been a bonanza for “fact checkers,” those organizations, usually claiming non-partisanship, that seek to ferret out lies and misrepresentations in both parties’ propaganda. The Times story starts out emphasizing both parties’ culpability, but then lets on that independent fact checkers have tended to find more mendacity in the Republicans than in their rivals.
Of course, the Republicans do lie more than the Democrats. That may sound like a crude partisan claim, but it is not only objectively provable, as the current campaign is showing, but it is not hard to explain. The partisan mendacity gap follows from the differences in the two parties’ intensity of ideological commitment.
Today’s Republican party is a party of the radical right. It is committed to a program of reactionary change that seeks roughly to restore the American political economy of the 1920s: a political economy characterized by a minimal or non-existent social safety net, ineffective labor unions, low taxes and few regulations capable of seriously constraining corporate behavior. I say “roughly” because Republicans know they can’t literally repeal all progressive public policy since the New Deal, but they can repeal some of it, and the rest they can eviscerate through defunding. (Sure, they’ll keep the EPA and most of the rest of the federal regulatory apparatus; they just won’t give it the budget to do much.) Like it or hate it, you can’t deny that this is a genuinely radical vision. Today’s Republicans are the first genuinely radical major party in American history.
The Democrats, by contrast, are a basically moderate party inclined to some incremental change. The most “radical” step by the current Democratic president has been an attempt to construct a (not quite) universal health care system utilizing the existing private insurance industry. Very broadly speaking, the Democrats seek to preserve and advance an approach to public policy that differs little from the positions of most European conservatives.
Radicals believe fervently in their cause and often have little trouble rationalizing the use of dubious means to achieve their noble ends. Lying, cheating and dirty tricks (e.g., voter suppression) aren’t so bad if the end result is victory for the Cause.
Moderates, by contrast are...well, moderate. Moderate politicians, like all politicians, want to win, and do from time to time stretch, twist or even embroider upon the truth. But that added impetus to lie--the ideological zeal that fires their radical opponents--is just not there.
Here I must acknowledge one very important exception to my explanation of the partisan mendacity gap: George Romney. Romney has lied a lot during this campaign season, even if we insist on the strict definition of a lie as a statement of fact whose maker knows it to be false.# But Romney’s mendacity cannot be explained by an excess of ideological zeal. It is explained more conventionally, by a deficit of integrity. He wants to win very, very badly, and adhering to the truth is just not a very high priority for him.
* This is an update of my KOS Diary of 1/23/12.
# A weaker but widely used definition of a lie is a statement made with intent to deceive. Many lies using this definition are technically not lies according to the stricter. But whichever standard you use, Romney is a serial liar.