But perhaps one theme has bedeviled me more than any other since I began writing these little pieces in 2008: If a person, in order to get his desired political results, finds himself lying and playing dirty tricks to pull the wool over the eyes of others, why would the person continue to believe in his own position, knowing that he has needed to lie to support it?
A few possible answers suggest themselves, different answers perhaps pertaining to different people:
A person might have so succeeded in deluding himself, that he might not recognize that he is lying.
Another person might be a pathological liar, the lying being more important than what the lies are about.
But what interests me lately is the idea that many liars know perfectly well that what they say is a lie, but tell the lie to influence public opinion to further their own self-interest.
The heavily moneyed class that we know as "the one percent" has certain members who feel that it is in their own interest to be sure that their class is preserved by any means necessary. They say things to convince the larger populace that conservative policies are in their best interest. The things they say are manifestly untrue, but as long as they convince enough people that they are true, the political system will continue to keep their class secure.
The question of conservative lying is always somewhere in the back of my mind, but a Salon article by Heather Cox Richardson got my attention by referring to a frank admission by William F. Buckley that lying was necessary to ensure America's survival.
In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr., came up with a blueprint for destroying the American consensus. Rational argument was a losing strategy, Buckley wrote in "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.'" If voters were presented with facts, said Buckley, they would choose government regulation. So a new breed of Movement Conservative leaders must start from the premise that what Buckley called "individualism"--that is, an economy in which individual action was untouched by the state--was as sacrosanct as the Ten Commandments.
Such a tale, told by a respected intellectual, was easy to swallow for people who craved certainty from people they considered authorities. But Buckley was selling a bill of goods, because he wanted to preserve his place at the top of the economic and social ladder. If voters were presented with facts, they would choose government regulation.
A very fine article by Philip E. Agre of UCLA, called What is Conservatism and what is wrong with it?, explains that Conservatism is nothing more than "the domination of society by an aristocracy." The Founding Fathers, not wanting to foster a nobility, banned titles. But lack of titles doesn't guarantee that an aristocracy won't develop. Our American aristocracy is in the process of separating itself from us rabble, and one of their tools is the lie.
