Why Republicans necessarily must lie
Rightist luminary Glenn Beck assured us that President Barack Obama is a “communist revolutionary” who hates white people. Prominent rightist commentator Rush Limbaugh stated “without equivocation that this man [Obama] hates this country.” Then there is Donald Trump, who finally admitted Mr. Obama was an American citizen, thereby acknowledging five years of “birther” outrageous lies.
A study released in March 2012 by the American Sociological Review noted that faith in scientists and science was declining rapidly among conservatives and frequent churchgoers. Nationwide, Republicans abolished universal suffrage by voter suppression, supposedly to keep elections honest. Yet Professor Justin Levitt of the Loyola University’s law school found only 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud from 2000-14 covering more than a billion votes. It’s not surprising that two moderate scholars, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, concluded in 2013 (and repeated in 2016) that the GOP is “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”
Rightists and Republican values are fundamentally opposed to democratic ones, but rightists and Republicans cannot acknowledge this publicly in a society formally committed to democratic values. More specifically, democracy champions liberty as requiring equality, whereas the rightists and Republicans champion “liberty” in the opposite sense of safeguarding and even increasing existing inequalities. As Karl Mannheim pointed out in his classic, Ideology and Utopia, inequality — economic, social and political — has traditionally been and remains central to the rightist perspective. This places the right on a collision course with democracy.
Democracy’s conjunction of equality with liberty arose in the very origins of democracy in ancient Athens. Aristotle noted the consensus that democracy means “freedom based upon equality.” He meant real equality, sharing political power. The ideological right, however, has traditionally rejected equality, even claiming it threatened liberty. The French Revolution — still a favorite punching bag for rightists — affirmed the leftist principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which challenged and overthrew the aristocratic inequalities of the ancient regime. Vehemently opposed to that revolution was Edmund Burke — the hero of modern conservatives. Burke identified “our liberties” with maintaining the sharp class differences of his time, including an “inheritable peerage” and an “inheritable crown.” American slave owners viewed the right to own slaves as part of their liberty, especially as part of the right to own property. The Republican Chief Justice John Roberts’ Supreme Court viewed liberty (freedom of speech) as allowing the rule of money to eclipse the rule of the people (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310, 2010).
Today’s rightists continue to oppose equality, but cannot admit publicly that their concept of “liberty” — giving unfettered power to corporate financial, and wealthy elites — is anti-democratic. Indeed, as if they were themselves champions of equality, they posture as “outsiders” or “populists” who attack the “elitism” of academics and liberals. This was particularly evident in 2016, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Donald Trump campaigned as an anti-establishment “populist,” which posture was quickly exploded when he revealed his millionaire-billionaire Cabinet choices — and his endorsement of establishment Republican policies on deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy and corporations.
Consequently, the distortions of the right inhere in the very structure of rightist thought. As long as our society professes democratic values, the right is doomed to pretend to be what it is not. It does not matter whether these postures are truly believed or not. The conflict between the equality-based liberty of democracy and the right’s commitment to ever greater inequalities is inevitable. There is no way rightists can be honest — whether to themselves or to others — as long as they profess democratic values, while at the same time pursuing fiercely antidemocratic policies.
Roger Carasso is professor emeritus at California State University, Northridge. He lives in Santa Fe.