What is the One Thing a Democracy Must Have to Survive?

And It’s Indispensable for Democracy. What is it and Why is it so Important?

Oct 23, 2023

We’ve All Known Somone Like This

Jerry, just remember- it’s not a lie if you believe it.”[1]

George Costanza, The Seinfeld Show

Yes, you know exactly who I’m talking about. It’s that person you know who never tells the truth about anything, even when telling the truth would be easier than lying. It’s someone like the character George Constanza from The Seinfield show who tells his friend Jerry his philosophy about truth and lies. That is, if you believe it, it’s true, and thus, it cannot be a lie!

Regardless of their motivation and beliefs, and, whatever amount of grace we wish to extend to this acquaintance of ours for their pathological lying, we try really hard to give them wide berth. Or, better yet, we try hard to avoid them at all costs, don’t we?

But, that happens usually in our personal or work lives. What about in politics and government where those who lie or paint false realities whose impact on our lives we cannot avoid? Why do we Americans abide so many liars as they run for, and today especially in Congress and in presidential elections, allow so many public officials to feed us a steady diet of lies of several types, varieties, and flavors?

The reason? We have gotten used to it. We are accustomed to it. Some psychological arguments can be made that some of us actually enjoy the lying! Whether or not we want to admit it, one way or the other, we now accept this pervasive lying as normal in politics and government. Most of us do not like it. In fact, many. if not most of us, hate it.

Beyond the fact that we do not condone it, do we really understand the damage this constant lying by elected officials and their minions does to our democracy? Do we understand the damage it does to our country and with it, damage to us by the fact we continue to tolerate it?

Nonetheless, it’s a fairly sure bet that as central in importance as truth telling is in a democracy, it was never even mentioned in your high school civics class. There was no need. It was assumed that everyone in public office would be, for the most part, truthful with us.

Well as they say, guess again- not anymore. Truth telling has become a rarity in the public square. For that reason, it is important that we understand the concept of truth as it relates to democracy since it affects all of us in both large and small ways.

Democracy’s Currency

The “currency” of democracy is truth. Why is that? If you think about it, the answer to that question is so simple and obvious it is easy to miss. Democracy must have truth. Democracy does not just need truth or desires truth, it requires it. Democracy requires truth about our country, its institutions, its leaders, its successes, its failures, and yes, truth about its citizens. It requires truth telling about “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of our nation. Fundamentally, democracy requires truth because it requires civically engaged citizens. For us to be constructive civically engaged citizens in a democracy, we must have truth, and truth requires facts, nothing less. Facts that we have confidence in.

Without truth from our elected officials, their appointees, and our political candidates, Americans cannot perform their important function of government as “We the People”, providing the “consent of the governed”. Consequently, without truth, democracy malfunctions and can fail. It is no small thing to say that democracy’s success demands truth for all of us, by all of us.

The “Truth Cycle” That Democracy Rests Upon

For us to be able to ascertain the truth requires transparency so that one can distinguish truth from untruth, facts from lies, half-truths from full truths, reality from fantasy, and opinions from facts. Democracy requires truth because a functional democracy requires the understanding, support, trust, and involvement of its citizens. People are not going to support, trust, or be involved in something, especially government, if they believe what they are told by their leaders is false, is only partially true, or in the least, their leaders begrudge in sharing truth with them. Democracy requires meaningful citizen participation, which requires civic literacy of Americans. Civic literacy requires truth. That is the “truth cycle” and why democracy depends upon it. As such, truth becomes a democratic standard, a principle, a key ingredient, as well as a norm and value all combined into one precept.

But our nation’s public square is being ravaged by the erosion of truth- the slow chipping away at facts and the distortion of reality, until truth is eventually absent. Or, no one knows what the truth actually is. Or, we can no longer reach a general consensus as to what constitutes truth. How does that occur?

Entering Democracy’s Danger Zone - “Lowering the Truth Bar” One Untruth at a Time

Because of democracy’s truth dependence, famed New York Senator Daniel Moynihan’s observation that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own set of facts is paramount to a democracy. There can only be one set of facts, one objective reality, not two or more realities. One has to be incorrect. The incorrect one is not a set a facts. It is an interpretation or it is an opinion, or both. But that does not make it a fact.

However, political scientists Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that in 1993, Moynihan (who had been a social scientist before becoming a U.S. Senator) also observed that when “…unwritten rules are violated over and over,…societies have a tendency to “define deviancy down”- to shift the standard. What once was seen as abnormal becomes normal…”[2] And so it is with lying and truth. Failure to have the truth degrades and impairs a society’s ability to accurately perceive and understand the reality they are living in. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat highlights the dangerous ramifications of deviancy being defined downward, something she calls “truth decay”:

“The decay of truth and democratic dissolution go hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information while he speaks truth and risks everything to get the “real facts” out. Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods.”[3] (emphasis mine)

When we stop caring whether our leaders are telling us the truth, we have indeed entered a “danger zone” for our democracy. It exposes one of democracy’s greatest vulnerabilities. For in a democracy, once its citizenry becomes accustomed to the lies they are told by their leaders as being normative, i.e. meaning lies are all they should ever expect from their government, the “truth currency” a democracy requires is instantly “devalued”. The bar is now lowered. The standard by which we judge our government’s effectiveness and its quality is diminished. Instead, the citizens of a democracy become infected with skepticism, cynicism, and eroded confidence, eventually having little or no confidence at all in their government.

As a result of the absence of truth, all the parts of the “truth cycle” that a democracy requires for its success- trust, support (confidence), and participation, are undermined and damaged. This lack of truth telling in a democracy undermines the very institutions and practices a democratic government relies upon to properly govern “We the People”. Levitsky and Ziblatt said it well in 2019 when they illustrated democracy’s reliance on truth:”[4]

“Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying. The idea that presidents should tell the truth in public is uncontroversial in American politics. As Republican consultant Whit Ayers likes to tell his clients, candidates seeking credibility must “never deny the undeniable” and “never lie”. Given this norm, politicians typically avoid lying by changing the topic of debate, reframing difficult questions, or only partly answering them. President Trump’s routine, brazen fabrications are unprecedented.” (emphasis mine)

How Badly Has Democracy’s “Currency of Truth” Been Devalued?

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, PolitiFact classified only seventeen percent of Trump’s statements as “true” or “mostly true”. The remainder they classified as “false”, “mostly false”, or “pants on fire”. Once elected, Trump continued lying as President. The New York Times found that during his first forty days in office Trump made at least one false or misleading statement every day in office.[5] Ben-Ghiat points out that “…Trump departs from all previous heads of American democracy thought, in devoting so much effort to the destruction of the meaning of truth in the absolute.”[6] As Levitsky and Ziblatt describe, no lie was off the table. No lie was too obvious:

“President Trump claimed the largest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan (in fact George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama all won by larger margins than he did); he claimed to have signed more bills in his first six months than any other president (he was well behind several presidents including George H. W. Bush and Clinton). In July 2017, he bragged that the head of the Boy Scouts told him he had “made the greatest speech ever made to them,” only to have the claimed disputed immediately by the Boy Scouts organization itself.”[7]

Lying Leads to the Birth of Dangerous New Terminology In Our Democracy

With this constant lying, we then began to see our elected leaders and their staffs invent new terms to attempt to define and create the appearance of normality when they shaved the truth to Americans. This happened with the “birth” of, and the prevalence and acceptance of, what began to be called “alternate facts”. Much earlier than Moynihan’s quote is founder John Adam’s famous quote about facts:

“…Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence:…”[8]

Webster-Merriam’s Dictionary defines a “fact” as, “something that has actual existence, an actual occurrence, a piece of information as having object reality, the quality of being actual, a thing done as “after the fact (a feat, action or crime), or in truth (in fact).”[9] Today we teach our children in elementary school the difference between fact and opinion.

Despite the fact we are instructing our children today what a fact is and its difference from an opinion, or the actual dictionary definition of the word “fact”, facts do not seem to be at all “stubborn things” to many Americans anymore. We also believe we are entitled to our own set of facts; Senator Moynihan be damned! Whatever you attribute this to, the internet or social media or the Dunning-Kruger Effect, with the birth of the use of “alternative facts”, facts are now whatever you want them to be. It then becomes a “short walk” for us as a society to dangerous places, such as for example, “alternate facts” that cause mass sickness and death from a pandemic.

When a society arrives a place where its culture accepts the idea that facts can have multiple meanings and multiple variations and can now be whatever people want them to be, that society’s democracy is now at risk. This is because the ability for that society’s elected leaders to manipulate the general public to their whims and wishes becomes immensely easier. Eventually, in such an environment, the bigger and more fantastical the “facts” (i.e. the Big Lie as an example) are, the easier the manipulation of the general public often becomes.

This became amazingly clear in 2017 just after Donald Trump was elected president. Trump and his staff maintained that his inauguration had attracted the largest crowd ever. President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer took the podium at a White House press conference to claim that “…this was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” Spicer said this despite clear photographic evidence that it was false. Photographs in a side-by-side comparison showed irrefutably to everyone that Barak Obama’s inauguration crowd size was much larger than Trump’s.

As one might imagine, the news media had a field day with this “low hanging fruit”. Senior Adviser to President Trump, Kellyanne Conway, was questioned shortly after Spicer’s press conference about the veracity of Spicer’s claim. She was questioned by journalist Chuck Todd on the NBC television network’s Sunday morning news show, Meet the Press. Todd pressed Conway, asking why had the White House sent Spicer to the podium at a press conference to make his clearly false claim about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd (turns out Trump was furious about the claims that his crowd was smaller than Obama’s)? Conway replied:

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving- Sean Spicer, our press secretary-gave alternate facts.”

Todd responded: “Alternate facts aren’t facts, they are falsehoods.”[10] (emphasis mine)

Thus, was born a new term to add to the American political lexicon- “alternative facts”. William Cummings of USA TODAY in his “Alternative Facts” to Witch Hunt’: A Glossary of Trump Terms” defined “alternative facts” as arguments: “…used to support claims that do not conform to objective reality. Traditionally know as false or misleading claims; also lies.[11] (emphasis mine)

The Actual Damage “Truth Decay” Inflicts on Our Democracy

Today, Americans have so many “alternative facts” available to them that it is easy to create one’s very own “alternate reality” in the civic square. It also has become increasingly difficult for Americans to separate, as well as distinguish, truth from fiction. Americans’ ability to discern truth in the public square has become a train wreck. We convert opinions into “facts” or “non-facts into facts”. We then apply the Dunning-Kruger Effect of “not knowing what we do not know” which does not alarm us although we really do not know what we think we know in the first place. Next, we add in the idea that everyone’s mistaken notions of reality are equally accurate and valid, and voila! Is it any wonder that our ability to exercise discernment and properly differentiate concepts in the public square becomes skewed, influenced, inaccurate, and even impaired? Now, with our computer and the internet, we can create our very own “toxic stew” of civic awareness that is negative and damaging not only to our own individual civic literacy, but to the proper functioning of democracy itself.

Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D., a family theorist and author joked about this idea of “alternate facts” when she quoted the famous comedian and actor Groucho Marx who once said, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes”.[12] While Groucho Marx’s joke is both humorous and insightful, Wedge was using it to point out the insidious danger of “alternative facts”, as their believability can create the potential for a civic disaster like the one we witnessed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In Wedges view, “…Authoritarian dictators crave control. If they can control what you believe and even what you think you see, then their power over you is total…”[13] And as we saw on January 6, 2021, the power of lies and alternate realities can cause Americans to storm, deface, and vandalize their own Capitol building while brutalizing the police officers selflessly defending it.

Author Kurt Anderson notes the precariousness and even danger of this type of conceptualizing when he asks in his book Fantasyland, “…Why are we like this? He goes on to answer his own question:

“…The short answer is because we’re Americans, because we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to this approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes the incredible and the incredible credible…”[14] (emphasis mine)

These “alternate facts”, as incredible as they often are, seem to “grab ahold of us” with some aspect of their believability. They can lead us down a slippery slope as has been demonstrated repeatedly in our history, but especially over the last seven years. “Alternate facts”, not being facts at all, can lead us even farther afield than simply coming to incorrect conclusions about reality. They can make us susceptible to becoming invested in fantastical conspiracy theories. As essential as truth is to democracy, lies are truth’s formidable opponent and should not be taken lightly because lies spread like wildfire. As has been famously said (in a wise quote attributed to more than one person), “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”[15]

This is why it is imperative that we make covering the essential nature of truth to democracy an integral part of this country’s civic literacy efforts.

However, as bad as this is, there is something even worse that occurs to a democracy by this process of truth decay, truth erosion, and acceptance of false realities. We will delve into that next time.

Democracy is so important. But it’s hard to keep, and it’s easy to lose. It’s up to us, and only us, to protect it.

Stay tuned…there’s more to come.

[1] “Art Auchter’s Art: It’s Not a Lie if You Believe It”, by John Auchter, Michigan Radio, NPR, August 2, 2019, https://www.michiganradio.org/post/auchters-art-its-not-a-lie-if-you-believe-it

[8] “Facts Are Stubborn Things”, Quote Investigator, https://quote investigator.com/2010/06/18/facts-stubborn/

[9] Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary-fact

[10] “Conway: Trump White House Offered ‘Alternate Facts’ on Crowd Size”, by Eric Bradner, January 23, 2017 Updated 12:38 EST, https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/politics/Kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts/index.html

[11] “Alternative Facts to Witch Hunt: A Glossary of Trump Terms”, by William Cummings, USA TODAY, January 16, 2018 10:57 a.m. ET, Update 11:57 a.m. ET January 17, 2017, https:’’www.usatoday.com.story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/01/18/01/16/alternative-facts-witch-hunt-glossary-trump-terms/1029963001/

[12] “The Historical Origin of “Alternative Facts”, by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D., January 23, 2017, Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children-201701/the-historical-origin-alternate-facts

[13] “The Historical Origin of “Alternative Facts”, by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D., January 23, 2017, Psychology Today, Ibid

[14] Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, pg. 7, Ibid

[15] Quotes Uncovered: How Lies Travel - Freakonomics

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