"The Lying Game"

Matt Stoller:

One of the reasons I'm looking into lying as a sociological force is because we know so little about how dishonesty as a political tactic applies to political liberalism. I sat in on a session with Drew Westen yesterday, an expert who talked about networks in the brain and how they make connections, and I asked him about how comedy changes neural pathways. His answer was that he didn't know since there was not a lot of data on humor. That is stunning, as comedy is a pervasive cultural tool that obviously has strong evolutionary consequences, and intersects deeply with dishonesty. In fact one of the key element that makes something funny is hypocrisy, which is why the Daily Show was at its best during the Iraq War, why the WGA's videos have been so amazingly successful, and why Colbert's White House correspondent's dinner was stunningly powerful.

And that is why I think that Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein read the implications of this finding of John Bullock somewhat inaccurately.

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don't. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters' attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people's attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people's thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.

Both Yglesias and Klein see this as depressing. Klein thinks that this puts campaigns unwilling to attack at a 'severe disadvantage', and Yglesias thinks that it means that telling your own lies might be necessary to 'fight fire with fire'.

In my experience handling attacks in campaigns, both issue-based and candidate-centric, neither of these is accurate. In order to deal with lies and misrepresentations from an opponent, you can't just call out the lies and misrepresentations, you have to call the opponent a liar. You have to tell a story about why you are being attacked instead of just illustrating that the attacks are untrue, and you have to use this story to reveal the character of the attacker. Political contests are contests of values and character, they are primary trust contests. Who do you trust to make the right judgment, not who is telling the truth? In the case of Bush/Kerry, it was a question of which candidate you trust, in the case of something like net neutrality, it was a question of whether people trust the telecom companies. Facts matter, but they are not all that matters.

This is obvious when you look at the Republican communications structure. They have surrogates and candidates, so that surrogates like Ann Coulter can call John Edwards a 'fag' without that becoming part of the story of Mitt Romney's character. Romney's attack on Edwards is outsourced to Coulter, so she takes the hike in disapproval ratings, he gets to free ride off her attack, she gets to sell books, and the media and the rest of us are distracted and say, oh, it's just Ann Coulter, she's crazy, right? This is also why they attack and undermine our surrogates, from Moveon to Michael Moore to liberals to trial lawyers to unions to bloggers to activists. They want to ensure that conservative attacks don't tell a story about the Republicans themselves, while progressive groups simply won't acknowledge that the right is fundamentally and pervasively dishonesty and perverted. Consider that it took Alan Greenspan to admit that Iraq is a war for oil, that our surrogates wouldn't make that obvious claim until he did, and Democrats won't even really do it now. That's not an issue of telling lies or the truth or being on the attack or the defensive, it's simply an issue of being unwilling to tell a story about what the right really is about in governing this country, and being unwilling to literally acknowledge it.

It's a politician's job to explain to voters why the other guy should be fired. If the other guy is a liar or associates with liars, that's often (though not always) a good reason to fire him. That both Al Gore and John Kerry refused to make George Bush's character a non-issue was gross negligence, and that George Bush attacked their character was completely predictable. He accused them of effete weakness and indecisiveness, and they acted the part by correcting his statistics instead of turning around and pointing out that Bush was a corrupt stupid spoiled child representing a gang of lying thieving perverted criminals.

Pointing out that falsehoods are falsehoods, without any underlying narrative, is like discussing torture without pointing out the authoritarian nature of the regimes that use it as a tool. It becomes an isolated and irrelevant fact, a tragedy like a natural disaster. Lies are also not always bad; sometimes they are social lubricants and used to spare people's feelings. Lots of people say things that aren't true, in fact, most of us break our word to ourselves on a regular basis (check your New Year's resolutions list if you don't believe me). You have to use their lies to tell a story about their character.

Yglesias and Klein are falling into the fundamental trap of older political liberalism, which assumes that technocratic arguments bear their own emotional content. You grant the benefit of the doubt to your opponent, and if something someone says is exposed as a bad or false argument, mediating institutions like the press or academia, or even the opponent himself will concede and move towards a more constructive topic of discussion. The facts are not in dispute. This is a good model of political engagement, but it assumes that one side of the political spectrum has not institutionalized bad faith, which now is a false assumption.

What you see, though, over and over, is that old liberals within progressive groups and most Democratic leaders, believe strongly that the facts tell their own story, that it is in fact immoral to call the Republican Party a corrupt vessel. That is why, I am convinced, they are so hostile to bloggers and their base, who do believe that Bush is not trustworthy to his core, and who do believe that Republicans are bad faith operators. I'm reminded of this response from Wes Clark to the Petraeus ad, where he became emotional when I asked him what people who thought Petraeus had lied should say.

Matt Stoller: So how do the millions of people who feel lied to by General Petraeus express themselves? What's the appropriate way to express themselves?

Wes Clark: Send emails, write editorials, call Senators, write Op-Eds, letters to the editors, but make them substantive, serious letters. If you feel like he has lied to you say so, but don't make the pun on his name. Show it with facts and let people draw the conclusion. It's inflammatory rhetoric to hurl out accusations of lying, that's a conclusion that has to be drawn by a careful review and examination of the evidence and it has to be used with great circumspection. That kind of reckless language, especially the use of puns and so forth, people don't like it, it doesn't change peoples' minds, it alienates support, and this is a democracy. We've got to convince moderate middle of the road Americans to come our way. We won't do it with those kinds of ads.

In other words, show that the arguments are bad, but do not call Petraeus a liar even if that is what you think he is. Do not name call. Do not make character-based arguments, not just because it is tactically unwise but because it is wrong to do so. Do not say that Petraeus is obviously a propaganda tool for a crazy right-wing to continue a war everyone hates, even though that is transparently obvious. If you do make this call, Wes Clark will go after you. This is beyond problematic, it is a fundamental strategic and philosophical error in considering modern political engagement.

Having dealt with campaigns in situations where they are under attack, this is politics 101. It should not be depressing that bad faith is rewarded in the political system, it should be fucking obvious. It has been systematically rewarded for 30 years. What is depressing is that Democratic leaders and progressive boomers that lead political groups continue to believe that the facts matter absent a larger narrative, that character-based attacks on Republicans or right-wingers are immoral, that the press is a functional body, that bipartisanship is good, that elites should pay no price for lying or getting anything wrong, and that people who point this out (dirty hippies) are as bad as any other extremist group. Why they believe this is the problem, a mixture perhaps of corruption, cultural norms, arrogance, and stupidity (hence 'the Village').

That they believe it is the puzzle.

Howie P.S.: H/t to Ari Melber for pointing me to this commentary.

Barack Obama