Honest Liars

The world where untruths set you free

All Politicians are corrupt.

For many Americans, this is a kind of imprecise but useful shorthand, like the impossibility of fighting City Hall or the inevitability of death and taxes. For many others, it’s an understandable or misguided shibboleth. But for tens of millions of Americans—maybe a good deal more than that—this is a literal truth. Politics is about power, power is about taking care of your friends, and if you think it’s about doing good in the world, you’re either hopelessly naïve or fail to recognize you’re peddling a currency in the denomination of vanity.

There was a time when corruption was not only taken for granted in American politics, but considered a positive good, most memorably codified in George Washington Plunkitt’s unintentionally revealing 1906 tract Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, which remains a fixture of political science classes. (Plunkitt, a not-too-bright political operative, said the quiet parts out loud to the muckraking journalist William Riordan.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressives came along to insist that good government was not only possible but imperative, and they started a struggle that has been with us ever since. Twenty-first-century Progressives, for all their differences from their kin a century ago, continue to carry that banner. And now, as then, they infuriate those who disagree.

This really goes to the essence of Donald Trump’s appeal: of course he’s lying scoundrel who says—and does—appalling things. They all do! It’s viscerally satisfying to see and hear someone who simply refuses to recite, or cower in the face of, smug pieties. Can he possibly deliver what he promises? Of course not! Is he consistent? Who cares? Will he be disappointing in the end? Probably—but so what! There’s grim satisfaction to be had in someone cutting through all the phoniness and revealing the world as it is, not as some fantasy of Progress that’s oppressive to those who don’t share it.

There’s a corollary to this line of thinking that’s important to note here. Over and over again, we’ve been hearing about Trump’s threat to democracy: Elect him and the world as we know it will end. Such fears are understandable. But proclamations to this effect are likely to backfire: they will widely be viewed as a pathetic attempt at blackmail. You think this is the first time we’ve had a crook as a president? People who hold such a view may not be able to cite Mayor Daley dumping ballots in the Chicago River to elect John Kennedy in 1960, or Rutherford B. Hayes’s dubious installment in 1876. (How do you think “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson got his nickname when he was elected to the Senate in 1948?) Sure, the electoral college sucks: just ask Andrew Jackson, the Donald Trump of the 19th century whose supporters got revenge by getting him elected twice after his deprivation in 1824. If you assume that rascality is the norm, not the exception, you’re not going to be surprised by these examples of dysfunction, or fear the death of the republic with the next one. The United States may well be going down the tubes—this is a bipartisan sentiment—but for these people, Donald Trump isn’t the reason. At most he’s a symptom, even if he’s unlikely to be a cure.

Is it possible to reason with such deeply entrenched cynicism? Probably not. But one way not to do it is to double down with promises of Good Government, broadly construed. It probably requires a language of success-despite, flawed-but-still, at-least-it-would-accomplish kind of language. Begin where people are, not where you wish or believe they could go. Demonstrate realism, then offer an alternative. That’s the kind of politics we need right now.