Speech, Lies and Apathy

We are all familiar with the “fact checkers” of the presidential campaign. Proud to be part of the fourth estate, these well-intentioned wonks uncover and unpack the various claims made by candidates, determining their veracity. But what if these efforts are in vain? And what if the campaigns themselves are not to be blamed? Is it possible that we are all culprits perpetuating this culture of “truthiness” on the political stage?

In previous columns for The Stone, I argued that the public’s trust in public speech, whether by politicians or in the media, has disintegrated, and to such a degree that it has undermined the possibility of straightforward communication in the public sphere. The expectation is that any statement made either by a politician or by a media outlet is a false ideological distortion. As a result, no one blames politicians for making false statements or statements that obviously contradict that politician’s beliefs. I believe that the unfolding presidential campaign provides a compelling demonstration of my previous claims.

Consider Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night. Ryan took President Obama to task for allegedly having “funneled out of Medicare” $716 billion dollars. It is simple for anyone with a computer to discover that the claim is problematic. As PolitiFact explains, the health care law involves anticipated reductions in future increases to private insurers. The distinction between “funneling money out” of a program and reducing expected future increases in payments to private insurance companies is subtle. However, the reason that Ryan’s claim is decidedly odd is that his own budget plans included similar anticipated savings from Medicare. Furthermore, every one of the thousands of people cheering that line, as well as the millions watching, knew perfectly well that Ryan has made his career by arguing for funneling large amounts of money out of Medicare. Since Ryan’s charge so manifestly contradicts his own beliefs, it is clear that the campaign assumes the thesis for which I have been arguing — that Americans no longer expect or care about candidates making honest assertions in the public sphere. They no longer expect consistency and honesty from politicians, and the savvy political campaigner recognizes that there is no cost to making statements that contradict even their most well-known beliefs.

Another argument for the thesis can be found in the Romney campaign’s recent attacks on Obama’s handling of welfare. These attacks have been much discussed, but it is worthwhile to look at the campaign strategy in detail to see how good campaign strategists exploit this relatively novel political environment.

Romney has broadcast advertisements that accuse the president of attempting to weaken the work requirements on welfare. The Romney campaign’s strategy makes no sense as part of an overall case emphasizing the economic failings of the current administration. Emphasizing the weakening of work on welfare at least suggests that unemployment is the fault of the individual, rather than the administration’s failed economic policies. At minimum, it is irrelevant to any claim about the president’s job creation policies. Moreover, it is simple to discover that the charges are false.

As Glenn Kessler, the fact checker for The Washington Post, has explained, the Department of Health and Human Services is considering “issuing waivers to states concerning worker participation targets.” Among the governors requesting waivers were two Republicans, including the Republican governor of Utah. No waiver has yet been granted, and such waivers come with demanding conditions. Why elevate an obscure issue that has as much to do with state’s rights as it does with anything else to a centerpiece of a campaign that is supposedly focused on the weak economic record of the president, especially when the theme could even be construed as suggesting that the president has been successful in job creation?

An assertion is an attempt to transfer one’s knowledge to one’s audience. It is clearly not true that Obama is seeking to undermine work requirements on welfare. Everyone either knows that it’s not true or can easily find it out by reading what independent fact checkers have said in easily available articles on the Internet. Furthermore, the Romney campaign knows this. So the Romney campaign is not intending to make an assertion. Given this, it’s unfair to accuse the campaign of lying. As I have argued before, it may not be possible to assert or lie anymore in a presidential campaign. The trust required to support the existence of such speech acts is absent. The blatant falsehoods in Romney’s campaign are possible only under conditions in which the target audience will not hold Romney accountable for false statements. Since the intended audience is not expected to believe the falsehoods, there is some other function of the Romney campaign’s ad.

The purpose of Romney’s ad campaign is to win over white working class voters, by connecting with what his campaign perceives as their values. That much is uncontroversial. How does the expression of obvious falsehoods about Obama and welfare manage to communicate to working class white voters that Romney shares their values? And which values does the Romney campaign thereby impute to working class white voters?

The available social science seems to support Thomas Edsall’s recent analysis that white working class voters have at least in the past been motivated to go to the polls when race is made an issue via invocation of welfare. For example, for the 1991 National Race and Politics survey, conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the median response to the question “What percentage of all the poor people in America would you say are black?” the median response was 50 percent (the actual rate at the time was 29 percent). Subsequent studies found similar misperceptions. In his 1996 paper “Race and Poverty in America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media,” the Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens showed that the media, in stories principally about poverty rather than race, vastly over-represents African-Americans in photographs. These misperceptions affect their attitude towards welfare. As Gilens noted: “The public’s exaggerated association of race and poverty … increases white Americans opposition to welfare. Whites who think the poor are mostly black are more likely to blame welfare recipients for their situation and less likely to support welfare than are those with more accurate perceptions of poverty.” The Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo reports in a 2004 paper that fully 24 percent of whites in his study agreed with the claim that “Blacks prefer to live on welfare.” One can safely assume that the well-funded Romney campaign found similar results in their own studies.

It seems likely that the architects of the ad campaign want to communicate to working class white voters the message that Romney shares their opposition to certain kinds of welfare programs, ones connected in their minds to African-Americans. Given public misperceptions about the connection between race, poverty and willingness to work, and given the race of the president, it also suggests that it is the president who is out of touch with this constituency. Much of this message would be awkward to communicate by means of speech acts governed by a norm of truth: in other words, they would be embarrassing to say.

How would the Romney campaign deliver this message by making only true statements? The strategy of the campaign is evidence for the claims I have made in previous columns about the erosion of trust, because the strategy of this ad campaign takes these points for granted. The Romney campaign knows that there is no cost at all to making obviously false statements in order to convey an alternative message. Claims in the public domain are now routinely treated as intentional distortions of facts to promote ideologies; distortions or misrepresentations justified by the need to “counterbalance” false claims from the other side. The Romney campaign is not at fault for making false statements. They are just astutely taking advantage of the political environment in which all campaigning now takes place.

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Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of three books for Oxford University Press, “Knowledge and Practical Interests,” “Language in Context” and “Know How.” More work can be found at his Web site.