It was the summer of 1973 and I was mesmerized by the Watergate hearings. Former White House lawyer John Dean told the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities that he had warned Richard Nixon early on that the cover-up would destroy his presidency.
Then came the revelation that there was a White House tape recording system. Those recordings later showed that Nixon explicitly condoned the cover-up days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, and that it was Nixon, not Dean, who was lying. Nixon’s political fate was sealed and he resigned the next summer.
Those were quaint old days in politics, back when facts mattered and lying had consequences. What’s the biggest single change in politics since the 1970s? It isn’t populism or media fragmentation or “dark money” in campaigns.
It is that lying, relentlessly and shamelessly, has morphed from a disqualifying behavior to a prudent tactic. Facts don’t really matter.
For those too young to remember Watergate, there were partisan divides around the Vietnam War, racial justice and government spending, yet there still was an expectation that verifiable facts would change minds and that lying was verboten.
It mattered to almost all Americans, Republicans included, that Nixon had tried to subvert our democracy and then lied about it. Today, such a reaction — a fundamental change in public opinion based on facts — feels impossible.
For all the discussion about automatic weapons, reproductive rights, racism and election subversion, the fact that truth no longer seems to matter is the single most important and over-arching political change in the lifetimes of baby boomers.
That makes the current U.S. House select committee hearings into the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, feel so remarkably different from Watergate. Trump voters by and large will tune out because the ex-president’s culpability in the insurrection does not fit their tribal narrative of good and evil. Fox News isn’t even televising the hearings.
The reporting heroes of Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, recently published an analysis in the Post that will be used as the foreword to update their book — “All the President’s Men” — on the 50th anniversary of its release. The analysis’ headline: “Woodward and Bernstein thought Nixon defined corruption. Then came Trump.”
In 1973, the special Watergate committee was established without a single “no” vote. After the audio proof against Nixon emerged, he was warned by GOP leaders that he would lose almost every vote in an impeachment trial.
In the foreword, Woodward and Bernstein note how the political climate has “changed radically,” with only two House Republicans — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — voting to establish the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection. It is that radical change in the political culture that makes life in 2022 so painful — and unrecognizable.
In today’s culture, Trump can be recorded bragging about sexually abusing women with impunity, as he did in the run-up to the 2016 election.
And if the House committee or the Justice Department can prove that Trump, in his lust to retain power, directly and willfully sacrificed the lives of five people on Jan. 6 by encouraging and then not calling off the rioters, that should matter, right?
You know it won’t.
Centrist and liberal Americans will continue to be bewildered at how facts and lies don’t matter. A vast swath of the Trumpian electorate has just decided to ignore what is true out of fealty to their tribe.
Yet Republicans have been quick to accuse others of lying as a tactic, apparently to inoculate themselves against charges that they are lying.
They seem to love the phrase “the big lie.”
They used it after the 2016 election when Democrats alleged Trump’s victory was helped by collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign. Former Attorney General William Barr described those allegations as “a very damaging, big lie” that inhibited Trump’s management of relations with Russia.
Trump then tried to appropriate the term “the big lie” after his 2020 defeat, claiming it refers to election integrity issues rather than the false claim that he won that election. He and his allies even got the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, and of course many obsequious GOP leaders, to parrot that framing.
James Carville, the folksy Democratic strategist for former President Bill Clinton, was asked by a Vox interviewer last year whether Democrats should distort the truth more often just to level the playing field.
Republicans can get away with lying in a way Democrats can’t, Carville answered. “We can only do what we can do. People always say to me, ‘Why don’t Democrats just lie like Republicans?’ Because if they did, our voters wouldn’t stand for it.”
Television stations in North Carolina recently pulled an attack ad from the air by the National Republican Senatorial Committee against Cheri Beasley, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate. The New York Times story called it an unusual decision.
The ad accused her of freeing a man convicted of charges of possessing lewd images of children when she was chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. There was no gray area around the veracity of this accusation; the ad was simply untrue.
Three weeks ago, the same Republican organization claimed in an ad that gas prices dramatically increased while New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan was governor. Also untrue, also pulled.
After the North Carolina ads were taken down, a spokesman for the GOP national committee said the decision to pull them would be “noted by our media buyers.” In other words, question our lies and you’ll lose our business.
So, centrists and Democrats, immerse yourselves in the Jan. 6 hearings on MSNBC and elsewhere if you are so inclined. And tell yourselves that this should certainly change things. And then brace yourselves for disappointment when it doesn’t.
The only hope is that turnout in upcoming elections will be strong among Democrats and independents. Convincing the far right of anything based on truth is a fantasy.
