How Trump's Lies Undermine Democracy
Yet another way, in addition to the ones you've already considered.
There’s an important point to be made about how democracy is undermined by flat-out lying.
We’ve had a few items here at GP/BP recently about Republicans and the truth: I talked about why Vance and other Republicans lie so much, guest writer William Bianco had more about the Republicans and misinformation, and David had a good one about how journalists can (and can’t) deal with candidates who don’t tell the truth.
Donald Trump, of course, lies. A lot. Normal politicians (and Bill Clinton was the classic one, but they all do it) stretch and massage the truth but try to keep it anchored in some justifiable version of reality. Trump? Not so much. I used to say he lies like the proverbial used-car salesman (in the stereotype, they’re definitely men) in that he’ll say whatever he thinks it needed at the moment without any concern about the long run. Over time, he seems to have become even more unmoored from reality, perhaps because he’s become the Consumer-in-Chief of GOP-aligned media, especially the more nutty versions of it.
This brings us to Trump deciding to tell and amplify a lot of lies about Hurricane Helene and the federal response. Enough so that FEMA had to set up a site to knock down “rumors” spread in large part by him and his allies.
Some of the costs are obvious. People affected by storms who believe the false stories may lose out on available assistance, or even put themselves in danger. Government officials have to deal with it, imposing costs and distractions from actually getting the job done for overworked and stressed officials at the local, state, and federal levels. Not to mention the death threats that come with the lies. And to the extent that deliberation depends on facts, rampant misinformation makes it harder.
I’m thinking of another way lies undermine democracy, however: To the extent a party just makes up stuff, it tends to undermine the most minimal claims about democracy.
There are lots of answers to the question of how democracy works, and some of them are very complicated.1 But the simplest one, and in a way the most basic, is that democracy “works” by giving the in-party strong incentives to produce good policy outcomes and the out-party strong incentives to find and exploit bad policy outcomes, and even to formulate alternative policies.
That doesn’t work if one of the parties flat-out lies about things. It’s less about what voters believe than what politicians believe. Trump when he was in the White House acted as if it didn’t matter what he did because he would just say everything was perfect; when Trump has been out of office, he has rarely bothered to make reality-based criticisms, and as the campaign goes on he seems less and less anchored by actual events.
It’s not just Trump. Think about the Republican-majority House over the last two years. They entered office planning to focus on oversight, not legislation…but their “oversight” is a whole bunch of nonsense about Hunter Biden and other GOP-aligned media greatest hits, not about things the government is actually doing. The House record on immigration is instructive. They did pass a messaging bill, which is fine as far as it goes, although they refused to negotiate with the Senate over that chamber’s bipartisan bill. But their main focus was on impeaching the Secretary of Homeland Security, which they barely tied to any specific actions he had taken. As far as real oversight? They pretty much ignored that.
The perverse consequence of all of this has been that the electoral incentives for the Biden administration to govern well have actually been reduced, given that the criticisms they’re getting in many instances have zero to do with real-life events.
Indeed, even media attention is diverted from learning how well (or badly) things are going into either broadcasting or fact-checking the liars.
Has FEMA done well in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene? I have no idea. I know that a whole bunch of crap that Trump and others have said isn’t true. I know, whatever Marjorie Taylor Greene says, that “they” don’t control the weather and didn’t program storms to give Democrats an electoral advantage. I know that it’s not the case that Biden gave all of FEMA’s money to migrants, or that the entire emergency response is actually a conspiracy to seize people’s houses. In a proper world, Republicans would be carefully monitoring the situation and drawing attention to problems – and no matter how well it’s handled there are always things that could be improved – but instead they’re just inventing phony stories.
Look: Even at it’s best, the incentive to have good policy results is somewhat precarious. An Education Department or White House staff scandal in the second year of a presidency is almost certain to be forgotten by election time, even if it had a real effect on quite a few voters – indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that a recession that ends around the time of the midterms won’t hurt a president’s re-election effort, as long as there’s a solid recovery.
We know, however, that politicians and the people around them really think that mistakes they make could cost them at election time. And that’s what really matters, because what politicians believe affects how they act.
Notice that normal political spin keeps the incentives in the correct direction. It’s basically not a problem, at least not for this stuff, if the out-party exaggerates real problems while the in-party downplays them; if anything, it’s probably healthy.2 As long as it remains tied to some kind of reality.
But Trump-style lies? They break down healthy incentives for politicians, perhaps completely. And without that, it’s not clear how a big part of democracy can work at all.
For example, one might argue…okay, I might argue that democracy works in large part through internal party deliberations — democracy within the parties is crucial for a functioning republic. But why that is true is not, I’ll admit, obvious.
Yes: “Bad” politics, such as the correct type of lies, can be good for the political system and good for democracy. “Good” politics, in which politicians always stuck to the absolute truth, might be worse. Good Politics/Bad Politics: It’s complicated! And this isn’t the only instance where seemingly “bad” politics might actually be healthy. But not always. Lots of “it depends” going on here.