Written by Winston P. Nagan   

The Politics of Untruth
by
Winston P. Nagan

Last night Michelle Obama, wife of the President, addressing the Democratic Party Convention, made a particular point about the importance of truth in politics. This was a reference to widespread concerns in the media and in the fact-check industry that a great deal of the messages sent out by the Republican Party were messages that were untruthful. It is possible that political campaigns tend to stretch the truth and sometimes pass over the line, which demarcates truth from falsity. The current campaign however, seems to have made the stretching of the truth so rigorous that it represents a virtual institutionalization of untruth as a form of political mobilization.
The Republican Convention in Tampa was thought to be a historically unprecedented exercise in the politics of the untruth. The convention was itself an extraordinary extravaganza, which might have served the purpose of clouding over its terminological inexactitudes. Still, some truth managed to be seen from the platform that the party had endorsed. The platform was considered a politically over-the-top document. It seemed to be clearly an appeal to the most rabid and crude extremist, radicals of reaction views on the fringes of the party. This wing of the party has a congenital inability to digest objective truth, in particular, if the truth generates a cognitive dissonance from its preconditioned ideological beliefs. The only truth that it sees is the truths consistent with its ideological orientation.
What was particularly interesting was that the leadership of the party including its nominee, for president, Romney, seemed to represent a curious plea in avoidance of the radical, reactionary extremism of its right-wing base and the party’s own platform. This meant that the leadership sought to avoid the discourse and narrative implicated in their platform and values, and further forming the foundation of their extremist agenda. Somehow or other, the leaders had to square the circle: the extremist agenda had to be masked with a human face and this human face was represented by Republican speakers who made it out of the morass of poverty and related ethnic and gender deficits. This seemed to be clever messaging and it was designed to take the shine off a too obvious appeal to racism or sexism. These latter issues reflect in fact the coded introduction of racism into the discourse as well as the commitment to the war on women. The purpose of the struggle of Republicans to get a lion’s share of what there is to get was to provide an element of plausible deniability that the party and its platform are mired in vulgar racism and crude sexism.
With regard to racism, messages preceding the convention were loaded with references to President Obama as the food stamps President and as the welfare without work cheerleader. These issues imply that the persons who receive food stamps or welfare are lazy, indolent, deserving to be poor parasites in the nation. They thrive on welfare handouts and food stamps. The welfare “queens” are a vicious parody of the struggles that poor women, including black women have to confront in the culture of deprivation. What the convention presented was that they are also poor black and other deprived minorities implicitly endorsing the mantra that these folks are in fact on their own. The further emotive implication is that the desperately poor are blood-sucking parasites on a struggling economy. In particular, their parasitic benefits come at the expense of the hard working, white working class.
How are we to sort out fact from fiction in this slick example of political messaging? The speakers at the Republican Convention included blacks and Hispanics who were illustrations of families who struggled to be self-sufficient and achievement oriented. This much is true. Did they get out of the hell of poverty all by themselves or did they get some support from others in our nation? Was their achievement simply the gift of a lucky break, and they were alert enough to seize it? Here we have a mixture of truth and falsity. Perhaps the ambiguity here is a tool to create an alternative reality out of the Republican imagination. When the message is pushed into the domain of public policy, it carries the message that a black President is the food stamp and welfare monarch, and indeed, an apologist for the work and benefits of welfare. This is a manifest falsehood, but it has traction and in hard times, people at the bottom are given the impression that non-self others are getting a royal deal in the form of public benefits at the whim of a non-self other president.
Everyone knows that objectively this is untrue. The real purpose of the message is to stir up a subliminal animosity against African-Americans, Hispanics and all other non-self others. What is distinctive about this message is that it may be reproduced in almost limitless sequence with the support of unlimited corporate donations. The untruth is endlessly repeated. This raises an important question about political truths in general. The distinction is between a political truth based on objective verifiable fact and a perceptual truth, which is often an untruth but gravitates to the status of a perceptual truth by endless repetition. This does raise the question of whether political campaigns can manufacture truths by targeting the human subjectivity of perception, in a market place in which objective truth has only a marginal placement.
Communications specialists know that political advertising is meant to reach the subjectivities of the target of the advertisement. That target comes with the complex of subjectivities about identifications, values, and expectations. A constant barrage of signs and symbols of an untruth may alter the human subjectivities perception of what is true, what is possibly true or even impossibly untrue. This may suggest that the central theme of the strategy of the Republican Party is that messaging can be a reality creator and a reality denier. The existence of an objective truth is simply a campaign challenge to be overcome and the central issue is the strategy deployed to overcome the objective truth. One such strategy is flooding the universe of messages that may shape the individual’s subjective perception of what is perceptually true or false. Message repetition funded by unlimited resources without an effective rebuttal can indeed create a new truth and an new reality out of old lies and the condition of social reality.