The fragility of truth is a critical democratic weakness

Context

Demagoguery with its deceit of the public by authoritarian, anti-democratic people and groups is a major weakness of democracy. Arguably its greatest weakness. Lying is one of the many forms of deceit that is inherent in demagoguery. Demagoguery and deception operate as internal anti-democratic threats. Authoritarian leaders exploit popular discontent and genuine grievances using divisive rhetoric and false promises to wear democracy down while they consolidate power. Misinformation and emotional manipulation undermine institutional safeguards of liberal democracy.

Hannah Arendt, and expert on authoritarianism, argued that systematic political lying doesn't just deceive. It destroys citizens' capacity to distinguish reality from fiction, making collective deliberation impossible. She demonstrates how governments use "defactualization" to make facts appear as opinions, thereby eliminating the common ground necessary for democratic governance.

The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. -- Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, 1972

Lying and deceit in democracy

The book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1999), was written by moral philosopher Sissela Bok. Her core argument assessing lying and deceit in a democracy is simple -- there is a strong presumption that lies and deceit are immoral and rarely justifiable:

“When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily. .... But such cases [that justify lying] are so rare that they hardly exist for practical purposes. .... The consequences of spreading deception, alienation and lack of trust could not have been documented for us more concretely than they have in the past decades. .... Those in government and other positions of trust should be held to the highest standards. Their lies are not ennobled by their positions; quite the contrary. .... only those deceptive practices which can be openly debated and consented to in advance are justifiable in a democracy. .... To the extent that knowledge gives power, to that extent do lies affect the distribution of power; they add to that of the liar, and diminish that of the deceived, altering his choices at different levels***. .... Lies foster the belief that there are more alternatives than is really the case; at other times, a lie may lead to the unnecessary loss of confidence in the best alternative.”***

Three points worth highlighting:

• Lying and deceit takes from those deceived their power to think and act on the basis of truth. When people try to deceive others intentionally, they convey messages meant to mislead the listeners. Deceitful messages can be conveyed by a range of things including gestures, rhetoric, inaction, or even silence.

• Taking power from people to think and act on the basis of truth is inherently immoral and anti-democratic.

• Lying and deceit are intentional and knowing. The landscape there is generally immoral. However, honest mistakes can often be assessed to as morally neutral or positive.

Bok argues identifies and discusses major effects of deceit and lying, some of which are obvious, but some not. Lies and deceit tend to lead to loss of trust in fellow citizens, government and social institutions. They tear at the fabric of society. When wielded by demagogues, lies and deceit are often dehumanizing. Demagogic dehumanization treats people as means the deceiver's ends. In those situations, people are not treated as respected ends in themselves. Dehumanization also tends to foment social discord, unwarranted polarization and unwarranted distrust. None of that is helpful for a democracy, but all of it is useful for authoritarians trying to gain or maintain power.

Bok points out an old argument that lies and deceit are immoral. The thought dates back centuries, e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas, ~4th century CE. The concern is that immorality begets more immorality. And, it can be contagious. Modern social science research indicated that lying leads many liars to lie more frequently and easily.

Regarding absolute free speech

In recent years, America's radical right authoritarian movement has bitterly criticized the banning of speech that asserts dishonest speech that contains some non-trivial level of lies, slanders, deceit or crackpot conspiracy theories. A bitter battle over such censorship played out with social media platforms. The war is over and the anti-censors won. The result has been that major platforms, e.g., Facebook, have backed away from moderating dishonest or dark free speech. The result is a degradation of civility and honest speech on those platforms. Social media has become significantly toxic with divisive, dishonest speech.

It is true that most of dishonest political speech is constitutionally protected free speech. One argument against moderating toxic political content is that the marketplace of ideas will sort fact from fiction. Research indicates that is false. Two scholars commented on the idea, pointing out that speech is an exercise of power:

“.... we should stop thinking that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ can effectively sort fact from fiction. .... Unfortunately, this marketplace is a fiction, and a dangerous one. We do not want to limit free speech, but we do want to strongly advocate that those in positions of power or influence see their speech for what it is -- an exercise of power capable of doing real harm. It is irresponsible to advocate for unsupported views, and doing so needs to be thought of as a moral wrong, not just a harmless addition to some kind of ideal ‘marketplace.’” -- The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (U. Cal. Irvine), 2019

Discussion

Is it immoral for people in power to not take reasonable care to insure their rhetoric is reasonably supported by facts and sound reasoning? For politics, is it persuasive or even rational to argue that since all politicians lie, it is OK for my politicians to lie, i.e., do two wrongs make a right (or is that not the right analytic frame)?

A pro-democracy mindset proposal

The ideology problem

A prior post here laid out the ideology problem in politics.

In short, belief in an ideology is inherent to the human condition. Practically speaking, it cannot be avoided. The problem is that various political, religious and economic ideologies carry baggage, mental boundaries, that tend to lead toward anti-democratic governance and society.

All of that can lead to some form of authoritarianism or bigotry. Religion can lead to theocracy. The drive for wealth and power can lead to oligarchy or aristocracy. Defense of a cultural status quo is often associated with significant intolerance and bigotry directed at target groups such as racial or ethnic minorities. Similarly, the urge for safety, stability and strong leadership has been a pathway to autocracy such as dictatorship, monarchy or military junta. Usually accompanying authoritarian outcomes is major corruption, sometimes kleptocracy.

A modest proposal: Two Practices to Reduce Ideological Bias in Politics

Over centuries, various proposals to coax humans into being more rational have largely failed. Humans are going to be human. The proposal here is therefore deliberately modest: two research-backed practices that can soften, not eliminate, ideology's worst effects on democratic politics. These acknowledge that ideologies are useful for making sense of complexity and that completely changing human nature is both presumptuous and impossible. The hope here is that meaningful improvement is achievable for at least a significant number of people.

To try to soften adverse ideology impacts in politics and other areas, a few mindset practices could be adopted for political engagement. With time and practice, these could become habits that feel less burdensome.

1. Distinguish fact questions from value questions. Research suggests that reaching agreement on facts is far more common than agreement on morals/values. To reach some potential common ground, try to identify what's actually in dispute, facts, values or both. This slows down the process of engagement. "It allows time for conscious reasoning to exert influence over unconscious biases, including limited open-mindedness.

Political arguments often conflate disagreements over fact vs values. For example: "Should we invest in climate mitigation?" involves both a fact claim ("how serious is climate change?") and an implicit value question ("how much should we prioritize environmental protection vs. economic growth?"). Separating these tends to make disagreement somewhat more productive because it often reduces emotion.

2. Update belief on clear evidence. When a person becomes aware of inconvenient new information, changing existing belief to stay in synch is often difficult and uncomfortable. Brains don't like it. Politics often touches on, sometimes even directly threatens, deeply held beliefs, moral values, or self-esteem or identity. In this regard, taking politics seriously is often difficult or uncomfortable, not easy or fun.

Research shows that people often downplay or reject information that contradicts their ideology or values. This is a natural human trait. Sometimes inconvenient information is fully dismissed as false or propaganda. This isn't conscious dishonesty. It simply reflects how unconscious motivated reasoning works, even for people trying their best to be objective. Although this can be psychologically uncomfortable, the ask is modest from an objective standpoint: when evidence is clear and relevant, let it matter.

The "modest ask" is there for a reason. Specifically, asking for respect for facts is a mental anti-bias incentive. Research indicates that accuracy incentives help reduce bias. When people are nudged toward accuracy, they can often overcome reason- and reality-distorting motivated reasoning to at least some noticeable degree.

Those two practices are exceptionally important because they address the most common failures in political discourse: conflating fact and value disputes, which tends to make dialogue circular, and rejecting or distorting clear evidence, which impairs learning and reasoning from experience.

Discussion

Can adopting these practices actually make a difference, given the historical record of failed rationality projects and the current polarized state of American politics? It seems reasonable to believe that these practices will make a meaningful difference if enough people adopt them, but can that happen?

Regarding problems with ideology/point of view

 Political, religious, and economic ideologies powerfully shape how people think. That often happens without people realizing it. When we hold strong ideological beliefs, the beliefs silently influence what we notice, how we think about it, what we remember, and what we believe to be true. Researchers across social sciences, politics, and psychology recognize this as a fundamental challenge to clear thinking and democratic decision-making. Despite that, most people are unaware it affects them.

This isn't about intelligence. Research suggests that people who score highest on cognitive reflection tests are actually the most prone to ideological bias. They're simply better at constructing justifications for what they already believe. Instead, ideological reasoning reflects basic features of human cognition, shaped by evolution. Our brains are wired to make sense of the world through frameworks we already accept, and ideology provides those frameworks.

Much of this operates unconsciously. People genuinely believe they're thinking rationally while ideology invisibly guides their reasoning. Researchers call this an illusion of objectivity. Under this illusion, a person believes their reasoning is impartial, but their conclusions were shaped by ideology.

Strong ideological commitment or belief tends to cause certain problems.

Selective attention to information: Ideological reasoning is dominated by unconscious processes that make you pay attention to information confirming your ideology while dismissing contradictory evidence. People don't consciously decide to ignore inconvenient facts. That just happens automatically.

Cognitive rigidity: Individuals strongly committed to ideology tend to show reduced flexibility in thinking. They accumulate evidence more slowly when evaluating decisions, resist updating beliefs when presented with new information, and tend toward impulsive reasoning rather than careful deliberation.

Resistance to inconvenient evidence: Ideologues characteristically downplay or reject information that contradicts their ideology, often dismissing it as false or propaganda. This isn't conscious dishonesty—it reflects how ideologically motivated reasoning actually works at the cognitive level.

Together, selective attention, cognitive rigidity, and resistance to evidence amount to significant problems for how democracies function. When large portions of the electorate think this way, the system tends to move toward gridlock, function more for special interests than for the public interest, or both.

The Democratic Damage

These cognitive effects directly harm democratic governance because elections and legislatures depend on people updating their beliefs based on evidence and new circumstances. When ideology distorts evidence or reasoning, voters often can't hold leaders reasonably accountable. Their ideology tends to distort what they believe about their leader's performance regardless of actual results, often including bad results. In that scenario, elections don't function so much as an accountability mechanism. Instead, elections work more to reinforce even the status quo even when it is bad.

In addition to that, rigid ideological belief tends to make compromise hard or impossible. Ideological reasoning turns policy disagreements into tests of moral judgment or acceptability. Voters become unwilling to accept or compromise with positions associated with opposing ideologies. That makes usually legislative problem-solving quite difficult at best.

Another adverse impact is that ideologues tend to lose their ability to adapt to new problems. Processes and events such as climate change, economic recessions, demographic shifts, and technological disruption require updating beliefs based on new evidence. Ideological rigidity impairs or even prevents the learning process needed to adapt.

What is arguably needed is a fundamentally different kind of ideology that could operate alongside existing ideologies. What exists now cannot be replaced. It is simply impossible to make the innate human trait of ideological influence go away. That stays with us because we are human. What that different ideology might be is the topic for another post.

A moral comparison of democracy vs authoritarianism

 

They both claim to be democratic, but

why make that claim?

Context

The emerging authoritarian government in America teaches us is that neither [moral] value, truth nor democracy, can be taken for granted. -- Michael Lynch, Truth and Authoritarianism in America, Politics and Rights Review, 2025

Comparing morality inherent in democracy and authoritarianism is not something the public significantly exposed to. It comes up in small slivers of academia, but the subject seems to be otherwise ignored, maybe taboo to some extent. Given the human condition, it is obvious as to why people inclined to accept or support authoritarianism would prefer to keep quiet. There isn't nearly as much good to tout about dictatorship, theocracy, oligarchy or kleptocracy as there is to tout about pluralist representative democracy.

Rational examination of the evidence supports this view. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is clear about the moral dimension: "Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives."

Democracy is vulnerable to authoritarianism under conditions such as when citizens are manipulated and select poor leadership that makes bad decisions, or when politicians are not held accountable for their failures or corruption. A lack of responsibility to citizens tends to undermine politicians' concern for the common good. That inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens, which in turn makes authoritarianism look like a better option.

America arguably is in one of those periods when authoritarianism looks pretty good to many people. Poll data backs up that assertion. However, sight should not lost of the fact that, for the most part, the political and economic forces that put us in this position are due to authoritarianism, not mistakes of democracy.

At present American radical right authoritarianism is having profound adverse effects on our democracy, rule of law, government, society, commerce, religion, education, culture, and scholarship. The evidence of authoritarian impacts is abundant.

A morality comparison

A good moral case for democracy can boil down to two major points.

Dignity and respect: One of democracy's core moral foundations lies in trying to treat each person with equal or reasonable dignity and respect. The execution isn't always perfect or even always getting better, but at least the moral ideal is generally accepted. By contrast, authoritarian systems are inherently based on hierarchical rule. Dignity and rights of individuals are conditional and contingent on the will or interests of those in power. Rather than treating individuals as ends in themselves, authoritarian rulers commonly treat subjects as means or tools to consolidate power, demonstrate obedience, or support state goals.

Research indicates that authoritarian regimes are usually associated with systematic human rights abuses, greater inequality, reduced social trust, and restrictions on individual flourishing—all directly undercutting universal dignity.

Implicit powers: Implicit in dignity and respect in democracy is a grant of certain powers to citizens. That power allows citizens have at least some say in how they are governed and under what laws they are willing to accept. In a representative democracy, elections and voting are the most direct and potent way to exercise this power. Another power grant is in citizens' right to support, oppose or criticize elected politicians and government policies and laws.

Rights inherent in democracy such as speech, protest and voting, are not just empty symbols. They are enforceable claims that empower citizens to hold leaders accountable. That is essentially absent in genuine authoritarian systems.

Accountability and adaptability: Democracy's competitive elections, independent media, and peer-reviewed research enable societies to recognize and respond to problems more effectively than authoritarian systems that suppress information and dissent. Democracies are much better than authoritarian regimes at information transfer to decisionmakers. Democratic institutions also tend to be more flexible to adapt to changing circumstances. 

Minority protections, less war: Research indicates that democracy is better at protecting minorities despite generally being based on majority rule. Constitutional civil liberties and the rule of law restrain majority power and protect individual rights in ways authoritarian systems cannot match. There aren't many examples of democracies fighting wars with each other. When democracies do engage in conflict, it's almost always with autocracies. This democratic peace theory is one of the strongest empirical findings in political science.

Circumstantial evidence: Most authoritarian regimes claim to be democratic. That assertion is demagoguery to deflect from the reality that people have very little power or say in government or how they live their lives. The dictators that run North Korea, arguably the world's most brutal and anti-democratic country on the planet, cynically call their country the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

“The sides [Russia and China] share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of states, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community. The sides believe that democracy is a means of citizens' participation in the government of their country with the view to improving the well-being of population and implementing the principle of popular government.” -- Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, 2022 -- signed on the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Some of the most brutal, murderous dictators on the planet lay claim to democracy. The reason is obvious. Few people willingly say they want to live under authoritarianism. Most people want freedom, and whether they know it or not, the power inherent in freedom. It really is just that simple.

An unpleasant truth

While signs of autocracy are clear to informed observers, mass manipulation can blind entire populations to authoritarian reality. Although most people say they think for themselves, people and whole societies can be deceived. For example, 2021 poll data from China indicated that 83% believed the communist-led People's Republic was a democracy. An amazing 91% of Chinese citizens said that democracy is important to them. Based on that data, China's dictators apparently see the moral value of democracy. They try their best to create an illusion of democracy among most of 1.4 billion when none exists. If the poll data is accurate, they succeeded. Democratic values are so powerful that even authoritarian regimes manufacture illusions of democracy to maintain legitimacy.

Discussion

If democracy is morally superior but sometimes produces bad outcomes such as extreme gridlock, excessive corruption or incompetent leadership, does that justify authoritarianism? Even if authoritarianism occasionally delivers a good result does that outweigh loss of dignity and citizen power? Is the concentration or wealth and power inherent in authoritarianism morally superior to democracy's tendency to better distribute power and wealth?