Lying Politicians: Why They Do It, And Why We Let Them

Consider the following statements made during the 2016 presidential primary season:

• Donald Trump said the United States has the highest taxes of any country in the world.
• Hillary Clinton claimed ISIS used footage of Trump in recruiting videos.
• Bernie Sanders boasted that the Valley News endorsed him for President.
• Marco Rubio said the United States was not modernizing its nuclear weapons.

As Politifact has reported, each of these claims is demonstrably false. And while pundits, editorialists, and loyalists can argue about the degree of deception intended by the speakers, the common voter -- and every elementary school student -- knows these statements for what they are: lies.

Far from disqualifying candidates for office, lying seems almost to be a requirement. Donald Trump and President Obama have each won Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” Award (Trump for the sheer volume of his mendacity in 2015; Obama in 2013 for his Obamacare sales pitch, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”) For their dishonesty, Trump has earned the lead in the race for the GOP nomination, and Obama enjoys job approval ratings far above those of his predecessor eight years ago.

So why do we put up with lying politicians? Could it possibly be that lying isn’t so bad? And if it is bad, why does lying correlate so highly with success?

The Case Against Lying

Philosophers engage in voluminous debates over the nature of lying and why we find it so objectionable. Most obviously, lies have negative consequences when we are maliciously deceived or make important decisions based on misinformation. Lies also erode societal trust, the bedrock of all communities and of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Many also believe lying, regardless of its consequences, is inherently objectionable. They argue that lying is essentially an act of betrayal, debases our own character, and expresses a lack of respect for others.

According to Dr. Piers Benn, a philosopher at Heythrop College London, lies subvert the fundamental purpose of speech: to convey truth to another person.

“If a liar gets away with it,” said Benn, “It’s because they’ve been presumed to be speaking the truth.”

For Dr. Alfred Kililea, Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Rhode Island, lying is fundamentally an act of unfairness. It puts us on a slippery slope toward worse offenses, and it corrupts the nature of the person who lies.

And in the view of Dr. David Simpson, a philosopher at Monash University, the most distinctive feature of lying is betrayal. He notes that the consequences of deceit without explicitly lying can be as bad or worse as the consequences of a lie. But there still seems to be something fundamentally problematic about lying, over and above the deceit or bad consequences involved.

“I might lie to you and not harm you, and I might even help you in some way,” said Simpson. “But there’s still a moral edge to the fact that I’ve lied to you.”

By lying to other people, we actively thwart their ability to directly deal with the world on their own terms. We replace their capacity for judgment with our own and deny them the option to take full ownership of their actions. Since we may value control over our lives as much as or more than the valuable things we attain or achieve, lies are very difficult to justify.

Immanuel Kant, the famous 18th Century moralist, decried lying in all its forms. Kant notably argued that lying is impermissible, even if you are lying to a murderer about the location of his innocent potential victim.

This claim, in Kililea’s view, is “Truly absurd.” Almost everyone believes some lies are permissible in extreme circumstances.

But the lying of politicians is in many ways more problematic than the ordinary case of lying. For a stable society, we must put a certain amount of trust in our political leadership. The betrayal inherent in political lying is both large in scale, because the entire public is being lied to, and it is great in stakes, because the loss of trust in a political system is potentially disastrous.

These lies also show a lack of respect for the entire population. “When politicians do lie,” Benn explained, ”they treat the general public as somehow stupid. Which is not a good attitude to have.”

Benn continued, “The real problem with political lies is not so much lies, as what you might call ‘b---s---,’ to quote the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, which is saying anything that is, in fact, convincing, without even bothering with whether it’s true or not.”

B.S. can sound trivializing, but its meaning is far from trivial for those who want to hear it.

Simpson shared some of Benn’s concerns. “So many politicians get away with what might look like bald-faced lies,” he said. “I suppose Donald Trump’s candidacy may be a good example. It’s not as if he really cares that what he says is true, he just thinks saying this will get the job done, or what people want him to say.”

When CNN confronted a panel of Trump supporters with the fact fact that he had lied, they were unfazed. For them, it was what Trump’s words indicated about his character, and how his words was reflected their own feelings, rather than the accuracy of his statements, that mattered.

“I don’t care about upsetting a few Muslims,” said one supporter, referring to Trump’s false claim that thousands of Muslims cheered the attacks of 9/11 in Jersey City. The supporter gave an impassioned speech about the emotional impact of 9/11, rather than defending the veracity of Trump’s claim.

“We’ve got people in positions of power who I know for a fact are liars,” another supporter said. “I don’t believe any one of them. I believe Donald. I’m telling you, he says what I’m thinking.”

Masterful politicians, and communicators generally, don’t need what they say to be true for their words to be persuasive. This highlights the dangers of dishonesty, because many untruths are resonant and powerful.

Machiavelli and “Dirty Hands”

We generally believe that lying is one of the worst transgressions that corrupt politicians commit. But we also recognize that they lie as a matter of course; it’s almost a part of the job description. Can we reconcile these beliefs?

Niccolò Machiavelli, a 15th Century philosopher, has long been a noted advocate of political lying. In his political instructional manual for princes, known simply as The Prince, he seems to advocate all number of immoral behaviors for the purpose of maintaining power.

It’s not hard to imagine Machiavelli wholeheartedly endorsing a winner of PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year. For him, perhaps the only downside to being such a renowned liar would be getting caught.

But Kililea pointed out a subtlety in Machiavelli’s view that is often underappreciated: “Machiavelli is not an enthusiast for lying, he just thinks you have to do it.”

Being Machiavellian does not mean having no moral compass. Machiavelli recognized the distinction between right and wrong. But he also believed that being an effective leader meant you could not always do what was right.

“He didn’t honor people who were not careful or selective about deviating from what was right,” Kililea explained. “You had to have a reason for it.”

Is lying a necessary part of a politician’s job description? Kililea believes the answer is probably yes.

He argued that the craft of politicians is an under-appreciated art in the face of impossible demands. “People want services without tax increases,” he said. “There’s no way to square that circle, speaking truthfully.”

“So what politicians usually do is they avoid answering the question, they talk around it, they make it seem like they’re answering it when they’re not,” Kililea continued. “That’s a skillful politician. A less skillful politician just lies.”

Michael Walzer, a contemporary philosopher, critiqued Machiavelli’s view for letting politicians off too easily. In his explanation of the problem he called “dirty hands” in politics, Walzer agreed with Machiavelli that politicians inevitably have to do many morally underhanded and duplicitous things. But the fact that they have to do things that are morally wrong doesn’t let them off the hook.

“Walzer’s hero is someone who is able to lie, and know that he is lying, recognize that he is lying, and feel the guilt,” said Kililea. Walzer doesn’t celebrate lying, but he sees it as unavoidable.

Still, many find this portrait of political life deeply unappealing.

Benn is much more optimistic about the possibility of an honest politician. “I think politicians do strive to tell the truth. They’re not all liars and charlatans trying to rip people off. I think there are politicians like that, obviously. There are people who tell lies, but I’m not cynical.”

“It may be necessary to adopt other stalling tactics to preserve secrets, and politicians frequently do this,” Benn continued. “It is undesirable, but in my view normally preferable to outright lies.”

The Noble Lie

Kililea likened the case of justified lying to the case of justified war. Unless we’re committed pacifists, we accept that some wars are justified under certain conditions. And if we think some conditions permit politicians to go to war, it’s hard to doubt that some conditions could permit politicians to lie.

Consider these hypothetical cases:

• In the midst of a large terrorist attack, public officials falsely claim to have caught one of the culprits to discourage other terrorists or force them to change their plans.
• Public health officials lie about the details of a dangerous pathogen in order to prevent an even deadlier panic.
• The President lies about the country’s economic health in order to prevent a run on the banks.

Many think that these are good lies to tell because the negative consequences of not telling them are so bad.

Any of these lies contains some risks. We’re never sure what the results of our actions will be, and that remains true when we’re lying strategically. And even if a political lie produces the worthwhile ends we’re hoping for, it may still dilute the public’s faith in government.

As Simpson pointed out, “Most of the lies that we learn about, say about the bombing of Cambodia, or about the war in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, whether Bush, Cheney, Kissinger, or Nixon, they might have believed that they were doing it in the national interest (assuming they were lying in those situations).”

Even if we can justify a political lie in theory, we might think that experience shows us that politicians who think this way often make wrong, or even calamitous, decisions. So we could be tempted to endorse a complete moral prohibition on lying in politics for all practical purposes.

“For Plato, it was okay [for rulers to lie] because his rulers were philosopher kings, and they were as wise as the gods,” Simpson argues. “But our rulers aren’t. We don’t actually have rulers in the position to make those wise judgments.”

Kililea echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “Once you start down that road, it’s dangerous, because politicians are good at convincing themselves of their rectitude.”

There are other concerns about accepting the theory of the “noble lie.” If we accept that a politician can justifiably lie when there are a great many lives at stake, we may permit far too much lying.

In any high-stakes election, either side might believe that its political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous. Differences in views about foreign policy, health care, and even road safety policy can leave tens of thousands of lives, or more, in the balance.

From the point of view of candidates, if “noble lies” are right, any lie told for the purpose of defeating a dangerous political opponent could be a noble lie. We could expect almost no honesty at all from political campaigns – and this is hard to accept.

Can we forestall this conclusion, without denying any possibility of a noble lie? Perhaps. We might stipulate that lies can only be just or noble when they are told by elected officials, rather than by candidates. And we might think that lies are justified only when they prevent clear and immediate threats, and that the threats of a political opponent’s potential political agenda does not fit the bill.

Speech in a political campaign seems to serve a different function than the speech of elected officials. As Kililea pointed out, “The whole purpose of a campaign is to be enlightening to the public.”

An elected official’s speech, by contrast, plays an important role in the duties of governance.

However, the distinction between elected officials and candidates may be hopelessly blurred when politicians are running for reelection.

Paternalism and democracy

In Simpson’s view, the issues at hand are of vital importance because they speak to the question of what kind of government we want to have.

Consider President Obama’s “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” claim. If this was a conscious lie, he might have thought it could be justified because it helped reduce opposition to a law that benefitted most Americans, including those who would have to switch plans.

For Simpson, paternalistic lies, even if they really do leave most people better off, are still morally concerning.

“Once we start going down that path, the headline story in representative liberal democracy doesn’t seem to be operating,” he said, “because it doesn’t seem to be about people making informed decisions. It’s about choosing people who we might rely on to make decisions that they decide are in our interest.”

Simpson believes that if we too readily accept the idea that politicians can lie to us paternalistically, then we have to abandon the idea that it is the people who rule. We abandon the ideal of democracy.

We can only really see ourselves as participants in our own governance if we believe we have meaningful information about our options when we enter the voting booth. If the norms of honesty disappear completely, voters become mere pawns in the political contests of the powerful.

“It might be that we just don’t expect honesty from our politicians,” Simpson continued.

He fears that if we don’t demand honesty from our leaders, we’ll become resigned to manipulation. “I hope it’s not the case that people do that,” he said. “But there does need to be an explanation for the fact that we put up with it as much as we do.”

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore