Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, December 17, 2012

Lying lies and the politicians who tell them

The F-35 fiasco (to use the alliteration journalists love) once again raises the question of the role lying plays in our politics.

Without thinking about it much, most of us are pretty sanctimonious about the lies politicians tell, even though we’d probably concede that absolutely truthful politics is an impossible dream. And collectively, as voters, we are actually quite choosy about which lies we bother to punish.

Andrew Coyne, among others, has done a very good job at presenting the government’s litany of deception over the F-35, and made his argument, once again, about why voters should care. But I suspect that, once again, they may not.

Four hundred years ago, Sir Henry Wotton, an English gentleman on a diplomatic mission, coined the phrase: “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

During the Cold War, the military historian Michael Howard pointed out that the nuclear doctrine of deterrence required the leaders of democratic countries to deceive their Soviet adversaries, and in doing so mislead their own public on an issue that was literally life and death. Professor Howard regarded this as an inescapable dilemma and vulnerability for democratic government.

With a little concentrated thought, most of us would realize that we actually do accept a degree of deceptiveness from politicians.

Barack Obama pretended to be going about his regular business on the day that Osama bin Laden was killed — most of us would barely even regard that as a “white lie”. Neither do many of us think there is anything odd about the president saying one thing to the prime minister of Israel in private and another in public.

But wait, you may be saying — those aren’t the sorts of lies that concern me.

At the other extreme, you might put Brian Mulroney, who took an almost erotic pleasure in lying — especially, it seemed, when there was no purpose to it. Days before announcing his resignation in 1993 Mulroney stopped halfway up the stairs to his office at the House of Commons and, with a delicious smile on his face, told us reporters gathered below that he had every intention of running for a third mandate.

We knew he knew we knew he was almost certainly lying. But he knew we had to report it nonetheless.

In between the diplomatic deception and the outrageous, pointless lie, there is a vast array of intermediate-level cases that are more ambiguous, morally and politically.

Politicians may have a theoretical duty to be truthful to the public, but they also are engaged in a bitter contest with ruthless political opponents, vying for the attention of an often disengaged public.

In this atmosphere, politicians may present a partial or misleading version of the facts, which they regard as truthful (perhaps only technically) but others see as lies: “an economy of truth”, as Edmund Burke famously called it.

Jean Chrétien could have sworn that he never promised to “scrap” the GST in the 1993 election, but that’s not what many of us heard. As finance minister Paul Martin apologized on behalf of the government for failing to keep the promise that Chrétien felt he had never made — fuelling their personal animosity.

In 2008 Stephen Harper repeated the untruth that the Liberals and NDP had wanted to enter a coalition with the Bloc Québécois so many times that some reporters trotted it out as fact three years later during the 2011 election campaign. (The BQ had pledged to support a Liberal-NDP coalition government, but would not have been part of the government.) This is what some people disparage as “populism” and the comedian Stephen Colbert has dubbed “truthiness”.

The public, or perhaps I should say the media, also try to hold politicians to what must seem to them an impossible degree of consistency. Most of us hold contradictory desires or views and are seldom called on it, except by our teenage children.

But politicians often try to live up to our impossible standards. Justin Trudeau, if I follow his public pronouncements correctly, voted to retain the essentially defunct long-gun registry as recently last spring, but always knew that if it were defeated as it was, it would then as a consequence be a failed policy that should not be revived. Perfectly consistent, he insists. We all know this is casuistry. It is a storyline designed to give an intellectual pedigree to a policy adopted for tactical reasons since he entered the Liberal leadership campaign.

Most of us find this kind of thing vaguely disagreeable, and it adds to our general dissatisfaction with politicians, who aren’t the fine upstanding straight-shooters we know ourselves to be. But that doesn’t mean we sanction politicians according to the scale of their deceits.

We are much less likely to be enraged by a flip-flop that moves the government closer to our own position than one that goes the other way. Stephen Harper was just exercising his sound economic management skills when he threw out his 2008 election promise to balance the budget just a few months afterward in order to respond to the recession. Dalton McGuinty, on the other hand, outraged decency itself by imposing a “health premium” which came out of our pockets just months after making an election pledge not to raise taxes.

Many political lies, of course, are similar to those we tell in our own lives when we are caught doing something we shouldn’t have done.

This is what appeared to happen with Bev Oda. It is, in part, what brought down Richard Nixon. But that old sinner Bill Clinton survived lying to his wife, lying under oath, and lying to the country on TV, in part because the economy was buoyant and the world was at peace.

The F-35 fiasco seems to have been the not-uncommon case of a decision made, then reduced to talking points, gradually congealing into an aggressive-defensive lie as the original reasoning ceased to hold together.

This is not a defence — perhaps, in part, it’s an explanation: conservatives here in Canada (as in the United States) do not trust society’s other institutions — the media, academia, the judiciary or the bureaucracy — to give them a fair shake if they let it all hang out as some people urge.

Oddly, at some level we seem to prefer the practiced liar to the politician who obviously struggles with the occupational requirement to stretch the truth. The parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence, Chris Alexander, seems befuddled in his role of making the improper plausible, and he gets taken to task for it. Don Martin made the throat slashing sign and cut his mic on TV the other day. Is he losing points for being a bad liar?

The sheer financial scale of the F-35 fiasco — among the largest defence expenditures ever planned — and the level of meanness and mendacity with which the government has tried to silence critics who were, it appears, essentially right, has led some to think that this is a turning point in the life of the Harper government. Perhaps it will be a bit like the “credibility gap” that many think brought down Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

But as much as the government has abused the truth here, there is little direct connection in the F-35 story to the ordinary lives of most people. We already knew the broad outlines of this sorry tale at the time of the 2011 election, and as a nation we voted as we did. Alas, by the next election in 2015 this trespass on the truth is likely to have been long forgotten — and thus, effectively forgiven.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams

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