Blake’s truth, political lies
Despite the Sisyphean efforts of Star writer Daniel Dale (and others), whose indefatigable count of Trump presidential lies stands, as I write, at 2,083, there’s been relentless indifference, especially among Trump’s voters. Is this cause for despair? A moral breakdown? Is there an explanation?
The Trump lies explanation industry is robust and somewhat, in my opinion, persuasive. Business prof Daniel Effron, who specializes in morality and ethics, refers to the “it could have been” mindset: Even if it wasn’t, it could have been. Also known as the “expresses deeper truths” model.
What matters isn’t literal truth at the moment but the “underlying” reality that you know is so. Like: I know I am being screwed and no one else says it. Effron even applies this to the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd: Well, if there’d been better weather ...
It’s also the model for most political art. You depict how things really are — oppressive, generally — versus the shabby, misleading surface. Take Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America or Kent Monkman’s searing installations. I know journalists who became novelists to escape the stifling need to verify every detail while the world burned down around them. Fiction felt quicker and truer.
A Bloomberg piece cited an academic article from 1959 (!) by sociologist Seymour Lipset that predicted democratic trust “might be undermined if a large part of society came to feel abandoned by the political establishment … and set the stage for a lying demagogue to be perceived … as bravely speaking suppressed truths.” That’s numbingly prophetic. Bloomberg doesn’t say so, but Lipset’s germinal work was about the rise of North America’s first socialist government, the CCF-NDP, in Saskatchewan starting in the 1930s.
This verges on my favourite explanation, which I stumbled on last week while trying to escape Trump/Ford news by hiding in 19th-century Romantic poetry. It sometimes works. But William Blake wrote, in “Auguries of Innocence”: “A Truth that’s told with bad intent/ Beats all the Lies you can invent.” Yikes.
Sheer lies aren’t a problem, they’re clearly lies. They don’t seduce and move you, then leave you lying in the gutter with all the hope bleeding out of you. In that sense, lies are kinder. But truths told with bad intent, such as those of the Clintons or Obama: that there’s grave injustice in the world and U.S. society, inequality, racism, misogyny, homophobia, but don’t worry because we truly care and will deal with it? Then they embrace neo-liberal economic policies that nullify most of those expressed noble intentions because how much can you rectify racism or inequality in a society so staunchly, deliberately unequal.
Bill Clinton was a master of this double-talk. He felt your pain and can still trot out highly convincing explanations of why the world’s rotten, but stays a solid supporter of that order.
Obama was in a way worse. In his recent Mandela speech, he shows he knows exactly what’s wrong with neoliberalism — not just wrong but evil — yet without any will to combat it, except by hoping for a slight upgrade in crumbs from the 1 per cent.
On the contrary, he brazenly joins them, yachting and windsurfing ostentatiously. He tells the truth with bad intent in two ways: He didn’t try to make change, as he could’ve, at least partially, when he held the whip hand after the ’08 crash; and he intended to profit personally, as he has. Hillary is a vacuous echo, she may have forgotten what they still know.
Justin Trudeau? He told the truth about how awful our electoral system is, routinely awarding minority parties dictatorial power. He swore 2015 would be the last time ever. Then he ditched that promise, assuming he could win again anyway. Canadians continue to suffer the horrors, as in Ontario’s last election.
This also relates to whether Trump has “changed the norms” of acceptable U.S. political behaviour forever. CNN fusses over this. I think not.
Blake suggests that Trump’s an honest liar and you don’t really expect anything else. But the Clintons or Obama are false truth tellers, which is harder to take, and more will be expected from whoever replaces Trump, if and when they do, God willing.
Blake, meet Trump. Trump, this here’s Blake.