By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 30, 2014
All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most
politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new
about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies
anymore -- a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.
Postmodernism (the cultural fad "after modernism")
went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of
having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like
"truth" were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege.
Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society
-- and now they have.
Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently
caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals,
lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid
for her Harvard Law School education.
When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead,
she lamely offered that, "My language should be tighter." Apparently,
only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood -- period. In contrast,
Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is "truth,"
and she only needs to be "tighter" about her fabrications to
neutralize her reactionary critics.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for years falsely
claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful
in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background
during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate
misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume
that they serve the greater truth of social change.
In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it
matter if the president of the United States promised that Obamacare would not
alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the
good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters.
For that matter, the "law" that requires a
president to enforce legislation passed by the Congress is likewise a
construct. If ignoring bothersome laws -- whether the individual mandate and
timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law -- serves a greater social
justice, then such dereliction also becomes "truth." Blindly
enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the
interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes.
Without notions of objective truth, there can never be
lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve
the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don't become lies -- the
facts are irrelevant. When Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2007 heard the factual
details of the successful Iraq surge as related by Gen. David Petraeus, she
said it required a "suspension of disbelief." In her postmodern
sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth
-- and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply
an irrelevant narrative.
Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the
circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation,
"What difference does it make?" She had a postmodern point. If
President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and Clinton herself
all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect
video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of
opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected?
How could that good intention be a lie?
If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied
under oath to the Congress that the National Security Agency does not snoop on
American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper's goal was to silence
Obama's right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show
tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that
the radical Muslim Brotherhood was "largely secular"?
By what arbitrary rules can one claim that "Piss
Christ" or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or
inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly
pernicious religion? Was Obama's autobiography truth or fiction, or something
in between -- as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths
and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just
"composites"?
Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and
falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas
rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up.
Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible.
But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man
so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become "it
depends." Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the
statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they
serve the correct cause -- and damn any reactionary discrepancies.
To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but
some things are more relative than others.
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