Political systems built on coercion will always produce cheats, liars

By David McElroy · July 21, 2016

Ted Cruz broke his promise to support whoever won the Republican nomination.

Hillary Clinton lied regularly about the circumstances surrounding her private email server (and many other things).

Somebody on the Donald Trump campaign lifted some ideas and phrases from a speech which was performed by Michelle Obama four years ago.

Bernie Sanders spent the last year telling us what an evil candidate Clinton is and now he tells his voters to support her.

In all four cases, I say, “So what?”

I hear some Republicans today screaming bloody murder that Cruz didn’t endorse Trump when Cruz spoke at the convention in Cleveland Wednesday night. On the other hand, people who hate Trump and are eager to see him embarrassed are calling Cruz principled for telling Republicans they ought to vote their conscience. Almost everyone seems to see the matter through the lens of what he wants to happen in November.

In every one of the cases I mentioned above — plus hundreds of others I’ve observed through my life — one primary thing has been clear. People are almost always selective in their outrage about lying and broken promises. No matter what happens, they can find an interpretation that matches what they want to believe.

When a hated politician on the other side breaks a promise, it’s a sign of a serious character flaw. When a politician on their side — someone they believe in — breaks a promise, it’s a sign of having the courage to change when circumstances require it.

But because they rarely understand the hypocrisy in which they’re engaged, political supporters scream at each other, certain that the evil people on the other side have finally been exposed for everyone to see.

The puzzle to me is why people take politicians’ promises seriously in the first place.

They all lie.

If you get into an immoral system which has incentives to lie — and which is based on forcing people to obey against their will — you will become a reflection of that system. The politicians who get into the system can’t help it.

You and I cannot count on the promises of a person who believes it’s moral to use threats of force to get your compliance. If that person has already decided that he is willing to use force to control you — including sending armed men to your home to shoot you if you refuse to comply with his demands — how can he possibly think it’s a big deal to ignore a previous promise or even to outright lie?

Any system that isn’t completely voluntary is based on coercion. It’s based on the idea that a small group of people — allegedly chosen by a majority — have the power to dictate to everyone and then to use deadly force to back up their decisions. (Nobody ever seems to question why a dictatorship of a majority is any more moral than a dictatorship of a minority.)

An immoral system naturally attracts immoral people and it corrupts those who participate who might have otherwise remained moral people. The obscenity isn’t that politicians lie. The obscenity is the system that makes the lie inevitable.

When I entered politics, I was very idealistic. I never intended to be dishonest. I never intended to do anything wrong. But the longer I worked in politics, the more the ethical line kept moving. The “gray area” kept expanding. Is it a lie for me to write every word that a politician is quoted as saying? We expect that and think nothing of it. How big a leap is it from that to start shading the truth — intentionally misleading about one thing and even lying about another?

We end up with people arguing and screaming, but all within the confines of a system that gives politicians and their handlers reason to lie and gives their supporters reason to hypocritically scream about how evil the other side is.

But almost nobody questions the fundamentally immoral root of the system.

Earlier this week, there was idiocy in a teapot over a few lines from a speech read by Melania Trump at the Republican convention. A paragraph or so had parts that were startlingly similar to identical platitudes read by Michelle Obama in another campaign.

Democrats screamed plagiarism but somehow forgot the much more serious past plagiarism of the current Democratic vice president. Republicans who had been upset about Joe Biden in the past suddenly found reasons why Melania Trump’s use of the borrowed phrases was acceptable.

But the truth is that it just doesn’t matter.

I’m as big a Trump critic as there is, but the “controversial” lines are simply boring, generic sentiment that thousands of candidates and their wives express. It’s theoretically possible that one of the speechwriters had read the Michelle Obama speech. It’s even possible that someone overseeing the writing told someone to “give me a paragraph or two similar to this.”

Who knows? Who cares?

These are all canned lines spoken by people who stick to safe platitudes. None of what they say matters. It’s all political theater. All that matters is what they later impose on you — and coerce you into obeying.

If you understand that something about politics today is wrong and you want to criticize something, criticize the substance of what Donald Trump is or — more importantly — criticize the substance of a system which could possibly hand him the power to destroy the world.

Political lies to gain power are trivial. The coercive, immoral system itself is obscene.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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