Democratic Lies, Republican Lies

By Crispin Sartwell

American statecraft relies on two kinds of lies. We might call these Democratic lies and Republican lies.

The Republican lie, as befits the Grand Old Party, is the wholesome old-fashioned lie: the atmosphere of secrecy and disinformation dished out for traditional purposes: manipulating people into acquiescing in the policies designed by the politicians and their corporate partners. Couched in a burlesque rhetoric of patriotism and freedom, the Republican lie nevertheless is relatively direct and even in some cases obvious: it's the covert ops lie, the plumbers operating out of a basement room, the secret arms-for-hostages deal, the WMD lie. The question on Iraq isn't primarily whether there was a false piece of intelligence or two. The question is whether Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell perpetrated a disinformation campaign concerning Saddam's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, and his connections to al-Qaeda in order to manipulate us into war. I believe so, and they have set us to killing Iraqis and Iraqis to killing us..

The Democratic lie, on the other hand, is the up-to-the minute postmodern or post-human lie: conviction by focus group. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore, for example, are people who live beyond all belief; they are bundles of ambition with no internal identity holding them together: pure politics. Republicans lie. But Democrats *are* lies: there's nothing there at all.

Of course, both varieties of lie cross party lines. Consider Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the Gulf of Tonkin incident - and then the entire cloud of jive that surrounded their conduct of the Vietnam war. Or consider Clinton's straight-out mis-statements about Lewinsky or the tone of self-exculpatory evasion that pervades Hillary's memoir.

The Republican-style lie yields disastrous policy and implicates us in its application.The Democratic lie, while it does not necessarily create that kind of havoc (in part because it always agrees with whatever you think), is even more disgusting as a quality of the people who perpetrate it: it is a global, complete failure of moral personality, a kind of refutation of one's very existence.

Both, however, are incompatible with democracy. Barry Goldwater, in a sentence that stands as his testament as a public man, said that "without truth there cannot be freedom or justice, wisdom or tolerance, courage or compassion." The lie is always an attempt to reduce people's freedom or agency, to give them a delusory context of choice. If it succeeds, people can do bad things without understanding what they're doing. Their virtues, if any, cannot be expressed. The American people might even be good; deceived, we may commit acts of that would befit the greedy, power-hungry, and callous. That is exactly what we are doing.

Goldwater himself was driven to apoplexy both by the lies that took us to Vietnam and started our children killing their children, and by the Watergate scandal with its rumor mill concerning Democratic candidates and systematic concealment of Nixon's real personality. Congressional Republicans selected Goldwater to tell Nixon it was time to resign; they knew he'd give Nixon the unvarnished truth.

And people cannot really participate in a democracy when their leaders are completely concealed under layers of mindless, gutless rhetoric. Even as Clinton and Gore presided over an era of peace and prosperity, more and more people stopped participating. It became pointless or even impossible to care about people without conviction or reality.

But though I'm obviously pretty cynical, I don't believe that it's impossible that an American politician could resolve to speak the truth and live it. I have a certain respect for John McCain (who occupies Goldwater's senate seat) and perhaps for Howard Dean as well. But we had better stay focused on the fact that truthfulness is the necessary condition of democracy and the cardinal virtue of public persons. We are being made into vicious people, if you'll excuse me for saying so, by a government of lies.

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Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" will be published by the State University of New York Press this Fall.