Stand for the Truth

In a recent column at The American Conservative Rod Dreher quotes a message from Donald Trump in which he makes several claims about chicanery in the Arizona election. Among other things he asserts that the entire database of Maricopa Co. has been deleted, the boxes that hold the votes show evidence of having been tampered with, ballots are missing, etc.

Dreher then shows a tweet by Maricopa Co. Recorder Steven Richer who states that Trump is lying, and that he, Richer, is looking at the Maricopa database on his computer as he writes that tweet.

Dreher is himself convinced that Trump is lying and writes this about those who will believe him because they were enthusiastic about what he accomplished as president:

Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it.

It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what is real.

What Dreher says about the willingness to believe what we have every reason to know is false is on the mark whether or not Trump is, in fact, lying. He quotes from his book Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth.

Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Dreher remarks that,

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth.

In pre-totalitarian states, [Hannah] Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Arendt wrote that a people’s eagerness to believe lies that pleased them was a clear sign of a pre-totalitarian society:

The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

Arendt also wrote in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism that "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction...and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."

Dreher concludes with these thoughts:

Look, I wrote a whole book that describes the left-wing ideological assault on the truth, for the sake of achieving political power. We on the Right are no better than them if we surrender the truth for the sake of power. Donald Trump is not forcing anybody to accept the lie. That is on us.

If you are a member of Congress who would rather affirm something you know to be a lie, or should know is a lie, because you are afraid of losing your job, then you have already lost something far more important than your job.

Once again, I want to see a Republican Party that embodies many of the principles associated with Trump: immigration restriction, anti-globalism, cultural conservatism, and so forth. But none of that matters if we abandon the truth. None of it. That is a price too high for honest men and women to pay.

Truth matters. Not "truth" as in whatever works to promote one's particular political agenda, but objective truth that corresponds to objective reality.

Good people who were paying attention were disgusted by those who spent almost the entire Trump presidency perpetuating the libel that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election (and who have the chutzpah to now affix the stigma of the "Big Lie" to Trump for insisting that the Democrats stole the 2020 election).

But if the only lies that disgust us are those purveyed by those we oppose politically, then we're no different than they are. Dreher's right. If Trump is lying he should be publicly called to account by the GOP. More than that, Republicans need to find a candidate in 2024 who will give us Trump's policies without Trump's character flaws.

If neither Republicans nor Democrats will put truth before party then our nation won't, nor will it deserve to, survive.