When One Party Always Lies

I said in a previous post that liberals like to think that our policies are non-ideological because we think that our conception of good is so utterly obvious that everyone ought to agree with it. I also either said in a previous post or just had the thought that conservatives by and large disagree with us liberals because they don't share our conception of good, not because they get the empirical logic damn wrong. But it is also undeniably true that conservatives in the public eye make a good many claims of fact that are empirically demonstrably false. So what gives?

Well, I think the answer is that most conservative elites are not operating under the liberal conception of good, i.e. that public policies ought to make the lives of everyone they can manage better. And in some areas, specifically those touched on by conservative religion or questions of race, much of the hard-core conservative base isn't playing by those rules either. But that only extends to, maybe, the 30th or 35th percentile of liberalness in the country. Beyond that, most people basically endorse kindness as the guiding principle of public policy (though they might be squeamish about that word). So the liberal are right that, for an awfully big majority of this country, center-left policies are in fact a relatively simple matter of pragmatism and empiricism. And conservatives know that!

I once ran a thought experiment of trying to figure out what you can reasonably infer if a major political party in a given country repeatedly makes demonstrably false claims of fact. My conclusion was that it means that have a hidden agenda, an ulterior motive that they don't want becoming public. The idea is that they have their real agenda, but they know that it's an unpopular agenda and that if they openly advocated, say, giving all the country's money to rich people, they wouldn't win elections. So instead they make arguments for why the policies which in truth advance their hidden, unpopular goals will actually advance the common goals of society. But these arguments are empirically false, which gets you to lots and lots of lying.

So what we can infer from the fact that the organized Republican Party is devoutly anti-fact is that they have an agenda which is not popular and will not play with anyone close to the median voter. And they know this. But they also know that the median voter is typically relatively non-wonkish about public policy, and that it will therefore be easier to convince them that when it comes to, say, economic redistributive policies, black is white than to convince them that they actually like black better than white. So they lie. And they get very largely away with it. And we liberals are left to stew in our frustration that of the 65% or so of this country that basically agrees with our moral philosophy, much of it gets taken in by these lies, often before the truth has its boots on.