Persuaded to be Embarrassed
I didn’t want to watch the news as the congressional Republicans booed Liz Cheney out of leadership. It was too troubling. Her offense was that she refused to stop telling the truth. God bless her.
That truth-telling has become grounds for removal from a Party’s leadership is itself shocking. Even more shocking, to me, is that no one doing the booing and subsequent voting seemed to suffer even a slight pang of shame. There was no evident embarrassment. It was just “good riddance” to a problem, where truth was the basic problem.
I was raised in a Republican home. Absolutely Republican. My father contributed time and money to Republican candidates and personally advised Republican presidents from Nixon through the second Bush. His favorite Republican may have been George Romney, Mitt’s father, but he also admired President Ford. When I went to work for President Ford as the first woman advanceman in White House history, he was proud.
Part of what held me close to President Ford, from the day I met him to the hour he died, was his relationship with Mrs. Ford. When others hid from the words “breast cancer,” Betty Ford announced hers in a public news conference. Just as famously, she headed for an alcohol rehab center and didn’t deny it. In both instances, the President stood with her — proudly — as The First Lady told the truth.
In the elected mob of Republicans led by Kevin McCarthy, truth has increasingly taken a back seat to persuasion. The truth about something doesn’t really matter if you can persuade enough people that truth isn’t true. The capacity to persuade has replaced the mandate to be truthful.
Republicans haven’t been alone in disdaining the truth. Recall President Clinton’s famous claim that the truth depends on “what is, is.”
But the Republicans are out-doing themselves. As early as 1976, Lee Atwater’s famous Willie Horton ad achieved its purpose. It used race, fear and distortion to persuade, and persuasion was more important than truth because, to quote Atwater, “perception is reality.”
Now here we are, watching the Republican Party’s leadership go full-out. They’ve given up promoting the truth. Tell the lies often enough, long enough, loudly enough and you will eventually persuade. And persuasion is all that matters.
I know how we got here. Reagan famously announced in his first inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.” It was the opening line to persuade Americans that the government was not “we the people” but “those welfare queens feeding at the trough.” Persuasion, not truth.
The mid-1990s gave us that fine statesman Newton Leroy Gingrich. “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told his Republican colleagues. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics.” Ugly persuasion beats decent truth.
By 2016, Reagan’s definition of government as the problem and Gingrich’s call to vicious name calling found a hero named Trump. Since government is the problem, Trump did all he could to destroy it. The route to the presidency had been paved with lies. No wonder today’s ticket to Republican leadership is embracing the Big Lie. Those who refuse are evicted.
I’m certain there are honorable people who are Republicans. I don’t mean to discredit them. But when I hear their elected chiefs — McCarthy, McConnell and Friends — I’m convinced their cause is lost. They’re no longer interested in “What is true?” It’s only “What will persuade?”
I shiver to remember that I once keynoted a Republican National Convention. I can explain my embarrassment about that, but it takes time and isn’t worth the effort. I’ll just stay embarrassed. But I won’t stay Republican. I can’t, so long as the Big Lie grows bigger, louder, and more distasteful, and my embarrassment at having had a small role in Republican history knows no bounds.
Mark Twain made his point when he reminded us that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is pulling on its shoes.” Amusing, but I’m not laughing.
