Llewellyn King: The Internet — where lies tangle with truth

“The Internet Messenger,” by Buky Schwartz, in Holon, Israel

WEST WARWICK, R.I. 

In this, the Information Age, truth was supposed to be the great product of the times. Spread at the speed of light, and majestically transparent, the world of irrefutable truth was supposed to be available at the click of a key.

The Internet was to be like “Guinness World Records,” conceived by Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness Brewery, when he missed a shot while bird hunting in Ireland in 1951. This resulted in an argument between him and his hosts about the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover (which he missed) or the red grouse. The idea for a reference book that would settle that sort of thing was born, which could help promote Guinness and settle barroom disputes.

The first edition was published as “The Guinness Book of Records” in 1955 and was an instant bestseller. You might have thought that there was a thirst for truth as well as beer.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s (dominated by Republican justices) repeated rejection of any suggestion that the presidential election of 2020 was fraudulent and that it wasn’t won by Joe Biden, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has called a rare special session of the Texas legislature to pass a restrictive voting package that will likely include the power for the legislature to overturn any election result it deems fraudulent.

This is happening across Republican-controlled states. They are ready to fix something big that isn’t broken.

Abbott has called the special session because the Texas legislature -- thanks to the Democrats denying him quorum in a parliamentary procedure -- didn’t get what amounts to a rollback of democracy in the regular session. Second time lucky.

What these Republicans are doing is equivalent to forcing men to wear blinders so they don’t stare at naked women on our streets, even though there are no naked women on our streets. Better be sure.

Behind all this rebuttal of truth is the Big Lie. It is promoted, cherished and burnished by Donald Trump and those who swallowed his brand of fact-free ideology. The Big Lie is with us and will cast its shadow of pernicious doubt over future elections down through time. The loser will cry fraud and state lawmakers will, under the new scheme of things, be entitled to overturn election results, violating the will of the people to serve their own political goals.

Mark Twain wrote a short essay in 1880 entitled “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.” If Twain were alive today, he might be tempted to retitle his work “The Ascent of the Art of Lying.”

The extraordinary thing about the Big Lie is its blatancy; the fact that it has been found untrue by the courts and by every investigation, yet it rolls on like the Mississippi, unyielding to fact, unimpeded by truth.

The Big Lie is an avalanche of political desire over democratic fact. It introduces corrosive doubt where there is no justification. It is a virus in the body politic that may go dormant but won’t be eradicated. The host body, democracy, is weakened and the infection can flare at any time, triggered by political ambition.

Historically, there have been primary sources of information and tertiary sources of doubt or refutation. For example, some believed that the oil companies were sitting on a gasoline substitute that would convert water to fuel. That is a falsehood that has been spread since the internal combustion engine created a need for gasoline. It was believed by a few conspiracy theorists and laughed off by most people.

When the fax machine came into being in the mid-1970s there were those who thought that the Saudi Arabian regime would fall because information about liberal society was getting into the country. Instead, Saudi conservatism hardened and there was no great liberalization. Today Saudis are online and there is no uprising, no government in exile, no large expatriate community seeking change. Truth hasn’t overwhelmed belief.

It is an awful truism that people believe what they want to believe, even if that requires the suppression of logic and the overthrow of fact. Gradually all facts become suspect, and the lie fights hand to hand with the truth.

As newspaper people joke, “Don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story.” Democracy isn’t a good story; it is the great story of human governance. And it is being subverted by lies.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

David Warsh: Of Biden in '72, Trump now and economic engineering

Reading The Wealth of Nations was a revelation for David Warsh

Calibrate v, trans.  to determine the caliber of; spec. to try the bore of a thermometer, or similar instrument, so as to allow in graduating it for any irregularities; to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities.

Nearly fifty years ago, I showed up as a new employee at the Wilmington (Del.) News-Journal on election night, 1972, the evening that New Castle County Councilor Joe Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate. Biden was 29, I was 28. The second-floor newsroom bubbled with intoxicating excitement and indignation. (President Richard Nixon had carried 49 states). But when Biden was elected president last autumn, I felt as though I had somehow turned the page.

I don’t know whether it was four years of Donald Trump, twelve months of COVID-19, the passage of nearly twenty years since I last worked for a newspaper, or faint memories of New Castle County politics, but a week ago I found the column I was working on, about economics and engineering, more interesting than the prospects of Biden’s presidency. I recognized late in the day that I hadn’t found a way to make it interesting to readers of Economic Principals, my Web site. So I put the topic aside and took a bye.  Walking home, I remembered the title of Albert Hirschman’s little book Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Action.

On the other hand, as a copyboy at Chicago’s City News Bureau in 1963, my second assignment had been to cover a Walter Heller press conference at the Palmer House hotel. Heller was then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. My attendance at the session was perfunctory; the news desk didn’t want a story. But from the Palmer House on, I was looking someplace other than City Hall in which to invest my interests.

That was all the more so after I returned to college to read history of social thought. Just five authors were on the calendar of the sophomore tutorial that year: Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. That was the year they omitted Adam Smith altogether and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, perhaps because of the temper of the times (this was 1970-71). When a couple of years after that, in the course of another assignment, I went back to read Smith for myself, it was a revelation.  I have been fundamentally interested ever since in the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about economics.

Take that column about economic engineering. I found myself thinking over the last few days not so much about the conclusion of an independent market monitor  that the operator of Texas’s  power-grid had overcharged residents as much $16 billion during a cold snap last month as about Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to end the state’s mask mandate and permit businesses to reopen at 100 percent capacity.

The decision to permit the highest legal rates to apply for as much as 32 hours longer than warranted was been reviewed Friday by the Texas Electricity Reliability Council, which declined to reverse the charges, even though the principles would seem to be well-established among specialists. “It’s just nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg,” the new chair of the Public Utility Commission said during a commission meeting.

But principles for telling people when and where to wear masks are anything but well-understood and universally agreed-upon. They have something to do with what we call culture. As economist David Kreps said of his 2018 book, The Motivation Toolkit: How to Align Your Employees’ Interests with Your Own: “My colleagues here [at Stanford University and its Graduate School of Business] don’t think this is economics, but it is.” I cannot seem to put that book away.

Economic Principals, says in its flag, “Economic Principals:  a weekly column about economics and politics, formerly of The Boston Globe, independent since 2002.” Economic Principals has written frequently about politics for the last five years.  Going forward, I hope put the subject mostly on autopilot.

The Trump presidency was accidental. It happened only because so many voters deemed inappropriate a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency. Trump’s tenure proved to be a turning point, a climax, a crisis that slowly will resolve.

How close he came to re-election! How desperately he fought to hold on to office, even after he lost!  The sharpest student of Trump’s career I know, who follows the literature much more widely than I do, believes it was because the now-former president understands that he is facing ruin. Suspicion of money laundering for Russian purchasers of apartments is at the heart of the case.

What I expect to happen is this: the Republican Party will gradually rebuild itself, election by election, as new generations – Gen X (b. 1961-1981) and the Millennials (b. 1982– 2004) take  over from the Boomers (b. 1943-1960). The Democratic Party will take advantage of a strong economy and threats posed by the rising great-power competitor that is China to deliver the country into a new era. Congressional elections will be closely fought every two years, but I am guessing that the Democrats may remain in the White House until 2032, though only the Republicans have won the presidency three straight times since Harry Truman.

Meanwhile, I’ll return to engineering and economics next week, and try again to find something interesting to say about blueprints, instruments, and toolkits. Plenty of other columns are already in line. Re-calibration complete!

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.