Things You Can Lie About

A short list.

Nov 15, 2024

It is impossible to have an honest conversation about the way that people vote in this country without understanding and acknowledging that a huge majority of voters know effectively nothing about what the government does. Votes are not cast based upon facts. Most votes are cast according to either rote party identification or according to some impressionistic reasoning formed by some unpredictable pastiche of pieces of true and false information that add up to an image in the voter’s mind that bears the same resemblance to objective reality that a Picasso cubist portrait bears to a biology textbook.

I can say this with confidence not just because I have spoken to many voters (a worthless pastime) but because I, a professional journalist, am in the 99th percentile of Americans whose job it is to know things about the government, and even I know very little about what the government does. This is not a matter of intelligence, but of time. Journalists, along with lobbyists, professional activists, political staffers, government attorneys, and policy analysts, are paid to sit around all day consuming and unearthing information about this stuff. Not a normal thing to do. Most people check out the news once a day, if that, and spend the rest of their time doing normal jobs and raising their kids and things like that. Yet even on my beat, which is labor, I constantly discover important facts and history that I didn’t know, constantly learn about new people doing important things that I was unaware of, constantly realize that the sprawling and myriad activities of government policy even in my little area extend farther than I ever imagined. And this is in one specific area. Can I claim to have a firm grasp on all of the policies in the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Transportation and the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and how those policies have changed from presidential administration to presidential administration over my lifetime?

No. I can’t. And almost all voters spend much less time than me reading about this stuff. Facts matter greatly in an epistemological sense. But they do not matter much at all in electoral politics.

In electoral politics, politicians say things and try to convince voters to believe them. In our system, the referee ruling on whether those things are true or not has historically been the mainstream media. But as the media has splintered and trust in mainstream outlets has declined (and as legal risk for aggressive reporting has risen in the post-Gawker era), the existence of a credible referee whose rulings were widely accepted has disappeared. Trump, of course, has made killing the referee by endlessly trying to discredit the media a key part of his own rise to power. He knows that his brand of politics flourishes in a low-information environment.

Some things are easier to lie about than others. Many voters have strong convictions about matters that they experience in their daily lives, but (reasonably!) have no convictions about big, abstract “issues” of the sort that politicians often debate on the national stage. It is interesting to observe that the core of Trump’s campaign was waged on the set of issues that I like to think of as Things That Are Easy To Lie About. They include:

The economy. What does “the economy” mean to an average American citizen? Nothing. Zero. It is a purely abstract concept that can only be made intelligible through grand statistical measurements spanning the nation and the world. What the average American citizen does know about is the economic experiences of himself and people he knows: Grocery prices, gas prices, rent prices, income at his job, how his family and friends seem to be doing. “The economy” has no effect on an individual’s life and a non-specialist individual has no ability to understand "the economy” in a meaningful way and therefore any old lie can be told about it simply by drawing a line from personal experience (real) to a conclusion about “the economy” itself (completely made up). Are egg prices high? Bad economy. Rent high? Bad economy. Hey, I just did a deal that will save the government ten million dollars! Good economy! This is also why Republicans immediately believed the economy was better when Trump was elected.
The economy is the biggest, most consequential, and easiest thing for politicians to lie about and to appear to manipulate for specific voting groups. Send people a stimulus check and they’ll think the economy is better. Take it away and they’ll think it’s worse. Due to psychological biases, like the fact that people hate having to spend money no matter how objectively wealthy they are, it is always an easy task to refer to some personal financial pain point and turn that into a harangue about a bad economy. A good way to gain some real understanding of the state of “the economy” is to interview a wide ideological range of economists and to constantly read the business press as well as the leftist press. A bad way to understand the state of the economy is to listen to politicians. A healthier political dialogue around the economy would involve starting with the ability of our neediest people to flourish, and working outwards from there to determine policies. That is not the dialogue that we tend to have.
Crime. How bad is “crime” these days? If you were recently mugged, you probably think it is bad. If you are a shut-in who does nothing but watch television news stories about crime all day, you probably also think it is bad. If you are a busy and distracted normal person who hears a presidential candidate howling about horrible murders and rapes sweeping American cities every day, you probably also think it is bad. Crime, like the economy, is a nationwide statistical measurement that can only really be understood by referring to quality nationwide statistics, but which is commonly understood by people by thinking about whether you or anyone you know has recently experienced crime, or whether you have heard about some crime. The fact may be that crime is low, but if a politician wants to say it is high, well, how many people are reading the FBI’s national crime statistics each year? Not many. Crime is also scary, which makes it even more emotionally powerful, and therefore useful as a motivational tool, than lies about the economy.
Science. About six percent of the work force is employed in science, technology, engineering, and math-related fields. The rest of us are not. Scientists understand science well. The rest of us do not. Science is the embodiment of a subject in which the only way to gain accurate knowledge is to listen to experts. Now, imagine a world in which malevolent interests—business interests, for example—systematically worked to undermine confidence in scientific experts, in order to protect profits which would be threatened if the scientific consensus was widely understood and believed. That would be awful. I hope we never see that. Likewise, I hope that no politician who has built their own career on resentment of the intellectual establishment would ever be so low as to sow doubt about, let’s say, public health measures, simply to reinforce the politician’s own status as the sole trustworthy source of information for the public. That would be terrible. It is very easy to lie about science, but God willing America will never see anyone dastardly enough to do so.
Minorities. America is still a segregated country. People who live in largely segregated areas and who have little interaction with people from different races or nations or cultures—and, in particular, little interaction as equals—have little personal experience to draw from when forming opinions about those people who are different from them. It is therefore easy for a politician to tell lies about those other people. If you live in a mostly white town in Kansas and a politician tells you that Mexican rapists and Venezuelan gang members are streaming over the southern border, and that Black criminals are robbing innocent people in large and faraway cities, well, what the fuck do you know about any of it? “Scapegoating minorities” is America’s most tried-and-true dirty political tactic. Our society’s persistent stratification and segregation by race and class allows it to persist. When people do not live with one another they can be convinced to believe any damn stupid thing. This, I think, is the main reason why “integration,” though it has dropped out of fashion as a topic of our national political dialogue, is something that our society needs to work towards with more energy. We all need to hang out more.
The Media. What is “the media?” The media includes everything from Alex Jones to The New York Times to Fox News to respected independent news outlet How Things Work. It’s all the media! Just like The Bible, it is possible to find support for any and all views somewhere in the media. Is the media right wing? Some of it. Is the media left wing? Some of it. Is the media biased? Some of it. Because the media is a vast buffet containing every flavor of reporting, it is a trivial task to cherry-pick something and wave it around and holler, “The media lies!”
If you have an honest interest in understanding “the media”—and I don’t know why you would!—the only way is to voraciously consume an enormous amount of news from across the political and technological spectrum. Few people do this unless they are trying to get a job at CJR or the Shorenstein Center or something. As a practical matter, the useful thing to do is just to develop the basic media literacy that allows you to identify a handful of credible media outlets that you actually have time to consume regularly, and which also allows you to consume them with a critical eye. The portion of the American public that does this is, to be charitable, a minority. Destroying trust in the media has been a goal of the political right for decades. By building their own propaganda networks, they have helped to undermine confidence in all legitimate reporting. Their effort has been helped along by an insular media establishment that was allowed to reap enormous profits for decades behind untouchable moats, and grew weak and full of groupthink and was easy prey when the internet came charging over the moats. Anyhow, nobody likes “the media” and “the media” means everything to everybody and scapegoating “the media” is probably the easiest thing to do of all, because the only people who care enough to call you on it are the reporters themselves, who have a clear conflict of interest.

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There you have it: Trump’s entire agenda. All of the easiest things to lie about. (I considered adding “The Law” to this list but left it off—it is easy to lie about because most people aren’t lawyers, but unlike science it does not exist in any objective sense. It is made up by the same people who would lie about it. It is more straightforward for politicians to rewrite the law and capture the judges than to spend all their time mischaracterizing it.)

Democrats will shake their heads and bemoan the fact that so many suckers are drawn so easily into this web of lies. I wonder if any Democratic politicians have ever told lies that would contribute to a general public mistrust in the credibility of authority figures that could then be weaponized by purely cynical actors on the right running on an “anti-elite” platform? An interesting question. We may never know. You can’t trust all these damn books

How Things Work

Things You Can Lie About

A short list.

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