Conservatives and the Truth

American conservatives have been having some major problems with the truth. Let's review just a few illustrative cases:

1. The WMD falsehoods in the run up to the attack on Iraq.

2. The continuing belief among some conservatives (including Ari Fleischer) that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

3. Global warming denialism. It's ALL based on lies.

4. Creationism. Same story.

5. Fox News on earmarks. They had a big story a few days ago that Mr. Obama had violated his campaign pledge to slash earmarks. Mr. Obama made no such pledge. He pledged to look at them closely and cut any that made no economic sense. Daily Kos TV had a wonderful compilation of video clips from the debates showing Mr. Obama repeating that promise, in the same words, over and over.

6. Bobby Jindahl on "the $8 billion train from Disneyland to Las Vegas". He claimed that the Democrats had inserted this boondoggle into the budget. Later on, reporters at Fox News extended the train line from Las Vegas to a Nevada brothel 400 miles north of Las Vegas. No such train line appears or has ever appeared in the budget.

7. Socialism. It is now a commonplace among conservatives that Mr. Obama is dragging this great country into socialism. Why? Because he's raising the top income tax rate for wealthy people to 39%. Under that staunch believer in capitalism, Mr. Reagan, the top income tax rate was 50%. Under Mr. Eisenhower, another presumably anti-socialist Republican, it was 90%.

I could go on and on -- the list of untruths embraced by modern conservatives seems endless. And this, I think, deserves serious consideration. Why have conservatives treated the truth with such disdain? There's nothing intrinsic to conservatism that demands abuse of the truth. Indeed, the intellectual integrity of conservatism right up until 1992 was no less than that of liberalism. I disagreed heartily with Mr. Reagan, but I did not consider him a liar. Conservative loyalty to the truth seems to have begun its erosion in the late 1990s and is now nonexistent. Conservatives don't even blink when their lies are disproven -- they simply re-assert them more loudly. 

I am sensitive to the criticism that I might be extrapolating the claims of a few extremists to the entire conservative camp. It's a common ploy used to discredit one's political opponents. But look again at the list of falsehoods I offered above. The sources of these falsehoods -- Bobby Jindahl, Ari Fleischer, FOX News -- are not the raving fringe of conservatism; they're dead center in the conservative movement.

I have a possible explanation for this phenomenon, and I hope that this hypothesis will stand up to criticism more successfully than my previous one about population densities. I believe that the conservative loss of contact with the truth arises from the unfortunate combination of two phenomena. 

The first of these phenomena is the proliferation of special interest media. It's most obvious with television. Back in the 60s, 70s, and well into the 80s, there were just four television networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Each had to reach the American audience as a single bloc, and so each presented the news in what it felt was the closest approximation to the middle of the road. The network's news programs were editorially indistinguishable; nobody could claim back then that any network was further to the right or to the left than any other. But with the proliferation of cable channels, the audiences could fragment and comparative advantage could be gained by zeroing in on a specific audience. Such was certainly the case with Fox News, which is undoubtedly the most politically biased news channel. 

But it wasn't just television that developed special-interest channels. Radio also developed plenty of sources of special-interest news, most notably Rush Limbaugh. The demographics of radio made this medium strongly conservative in its biases. And then there is the Web. We have seen a huge explosion of political material on the Web. This medium favors the liberals, and so we see a greater leftward bias on the Web. (Oh, and if you're wondering about "the eastern liberal media", such as the New York Times -- you've been watching too much Fox News).

The end result of all this is that the modern consumer of news has a gigantic array of sources of information from which to choose -- far more than could possibly be digested. Hence, that consumer must carefully pick and choose their sources of information.

Here's where the second phenomenon comes into play. Conservatives value loyalty. (See my earlier comment on this phenomenon: http://civildiscussonbetween.blogspot.com/2008/10/conservatives-and-loyalty.html)

Indeed, they value loyalty more than integrity. And when you combine loyalty with the ability to choose whatever source of information you desire, the result is predictable: everybody getting the same narrow supply of information. If that information contains falsehoods, there's nobody to correct them. The falsehoods are blindly accepted as truth.

The Founding Fathers valued freedom of speech and of the press not because they saw some sort of inherent, God-given right to speak one's mind, but because they knew that the only way to keep the Republic honest was to insure a broad supply of ideas and opinions. We have no sure way of ascertaining the truth; therefore, rather than attempt to censor falsehood, we must rely on a flood of opinion, a competitive marketplace of ideas in which only the most truthful ideas prosper. But conservative loyalty drives conservatives out of the competitive marketplace of ideas and into a small, uncompetitive corner, where falsehoods can go unchallenged. 

What can be done about this? I counsel sage patience: this problem is self-correcting. Conservatives are so completely out of touch with reality that they will continue to lose credibility and hence political power. Every day the evidence in favor of global warming rises, and their deceitful denial of AGW only exposes them as liars. Every day the mounting evidence of the financial crimes enabled by the unregulated capitalism of the Bush Administration makes the screams of "Socialism!" look ever more out of touch. Just about everything that the Bush Administration did was wrong, and the undying loyalty of 20% of Americans to those policies only serves to convince the other 80% that the Bush-lovers are insane.

Conservatism is in for a rough future. After the November election, I thought that there would be a battle royale within the Republican Party, with the moderates ultimately ejecting the crazy 20% and beginning the long road to recovery. However, I now believe that the lying conservatives have a death-grip on the Republican Party, and their loyalty to the cause will prevent them from seeing the truth. There is a very real possibility that the conservative cause has been dealt a death-blow from which it will take a generation to recover. If conservatives respond to electoral failure by circling the wagons and redoubling their tribal loyalty, then they will remain out of touch with reality indefinitely, and their political fortunes will continue to sink. 

I would not be happy with such an outcome. I believe in the First Amendment because I know that truth is best achieved by vigorous debate; if the only serious debate is that which is done inside the Democratic Party, I don't think it will be robust enough to serve us well. We need a healthy, robust conservative element in American politics to keep the government honest. The sickly, rabid conservatism we now have is feckless; it serves no end other than to advance the vanity of people like Rush Limbaugh. 

So we're probably looking at a generation of Democratic dominance in the government. It will probably take that long to fix the mess that Mr. Bush has gotten us into. But I fear that, along the way, we'll see increasing problems from some of the Democrats' bad habits: protectionism, expanding government spending, etc.