Their Own Facts-How basic misunderstandings about government benefit the right

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=their_own_facts

Their Own Facts

How basic misunderstandings about government benefit the right


Paul Waldman | October 12, 2010 | web only


When someone is propagating falsehoods about a matter of public debate, someone else will often say, "You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts." In other words, we can only have a reasonable debate if we agree on what the facts are. We may disagree about which facts are more important than others, but if you believe, say, that the Affordable Care Act establishes "death panels" before which seniors and the disabled have to beg for their lives, and I assert that the act does no such thing, we won't be able to have a fruitful discussion about whether the ACA is a good thing until we can get past the factual disagreement. Without a common set of facts, we can't come to conclusions, because all we will do is argue about what's true.

This is a long-standing problem in politics, American and otherwise. When we look, however, at the most widespread factual inaccuracies that pervade politics today, there is one common thread: Almost all of them redound to the benefit of the right. Some are recent, and some have been around for decades. Some, like the "death panel" lie, spread because of an intentional effort to deceive the public. Others bubbled up gradually, without anyone making an explicit plea for people to believe something false. Almost all of them, though, put a thumb on the scale for conservatives.

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For as long as researchers have been asking about it, Americans have expressed a jumble of contradictory feelings about government. They say they want government to be smaller, yet if you ask them about programs one by one, they support spending more on almost everything government actually does. There are some exceptions, like foreign aid. This, though, is likely built on the strange yet widespread notion that foreign aid takes up a huge portion of the federal budget; surveys find that if you ask Americans how much of the budget is taken up by foreign aid, the median estimate will be around 20 percent -- or 20 times the actual figure. Similarly huge amounts are believed to be spent on "welfare," while the actual spending for that program (now known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF) is likewise less than 1 percent of the federal budget. In addition, most people think that the majority of welfare recipients are black, which is also false.

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In the swirling informational miasma of today's media, it's often hard to figure out what's true and what's false, particularly when there are so many sources of "news" that evince little concern about facts. It's possible to be partisan and skeptical at the same time, but too often, people's baloney detectors are brought out only when the other side is talking. For instance, when Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle tells voters in an ad that her opponent Harry Reid "actually voted to use taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra for convicted child molesters," one would hope that even her supporters would say, "That can't possibly be true" (it isn't, in case you were wondering). But alas, that isn't something we can count on.

We live in a country that made a smash best seller out of The Secret, a book that tells people if they think really hard about something they want, like a new pair of Manolo Blahniks, the universe's vibrations will send it their way. And only four in 10 of us "believe" in evolution. A well-functioning democracy would seem to require citizens not only to be at least marginally informed but willing to agree that certain things are true, certain things are false, and once we determine which is which, we can move on to discussing how to proceed. Whether that spirit ever characterized our democracy is doubtful. It certainly isn't true today.

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