The Black Mold Of Republican Lies

Even when their smears aren't helpful to them in the short run, they harm Democrats in the long run. Here's a prescription for deterrence.

(Photo by Callaghan O'Hare for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Let’s assess how Republicans are running against Democrats, to the extent that they’re trying to influence voter decisions and win more votes.

I phrase it that way, because Donald Trump is devoting most of his efforts to election-rigging and election-theft schemes. On his orders, Republicans sprinted to gerrymander as many seats as possible mid-Census. He’s racing to install an intelligence chief who’ll be willing to manipulate or lie about intelligence, to create pretexts for seizing control of elections or worse. His loyalist federal prosecutors are sniffing around for excuses to seize or nullify ballots.

But Republicans are still campaigning.

Most proximately, in California, the Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton will hit the trail with Spencer Pratt, the failed Republican candidate spreading lies about his defeat in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Hilton says he may even appoint Pratt to a role in his administration, in the unlikely event that he becomes governor.

More conventionally (“conventionally”) Texas Republicans are running an A.I. generated ad that depicts James Talarico wearing a dress, singing a song about how much he loves transing children. To the extent that this is an appeal to voters, it works on the lizard-brain level: They want men to feel emasculated for supporting Talarico, and maybe to fool some thin margin of Texans into believing the footage is real.

The immorality is part of the appeal in their minds: Who do you want to elect: those of us on the front foot? Or our back-footed opponents? We do and take what we want; they can’t stop us; they don’t even really try.

And they’re right about that last part. Your description may depend on how favorably disposed you are to Democratic strategic thinking, but in both cases, the Democratic response has mostly been to play it cool, avoid direct confrontation, change the topic.

I want them to break this habit.

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Let’s get back to what I mean by that specifically in a minute. First: some navel gazing.

I don’t write at much length, or in too much analytical detail, about the strategic or psychological underpinnings of right-wing malice. These are not complicated people, and they don’t need much explaining. Their arguments and appeals are not made in earnest and so earnestly refuting them is usually a sucker’s game. I’m quite confident that most readers would gloss over my commentary if I wrote ethnographies of their degenerate culture. (Though, correct me if I’m wrong—always happy to oblige!)

That kind of thing—inhabiting the right-wing mind, or addressing right-wing claims and arguments on the merits—was once of some use, when there was still constructive dialogue across the ideological divide. Or when gullible or snowed-over members of the national press might benefit from interpretive analysis of right-wing misdirection. Why do movement conservatives do what they do, or say what they say? What’s really going on?

But that hasn’t been the case for at least a decade. There’s little reasoned thinking left on the professional right, no more shame, and certainly no more interest in right and wrong. The White House situation room is no longer a place where national leaders weigh life and death against the national interest, but a place where they draw up plans to conceal the president’s involvement in a child sex scandal. The degradation is so complete, it should be obvious even to people paid to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. If any members of the mainstream press are still under the impression that the parties are roughly mirror images of one another, they are beyond the reach of earnest argument.

The only targets of persuasion who people in my position might actually be able to persuade reside within the broad left. They include voters, who might make demands of their Democratic representatives, fellow liberal commentators, who may not always agree with me, and professional Democrats, who might occasionally find wisdom in good-faith critique. I believe we are all in pretty close agreement at this point as to what the American right has become. Our shared objective now must be to optimize methods of opposition, and contain the damage the right inflicts. That’s how I see my role.

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But that’s just me!

There are millions of people in America who could benefit from clear distillations of right-wing pathology. They just aren’t politics junkies who subscribe to newsletters. But even passive actors absorb political news and ideas, and if nobody with real reach and authority tells them what we all take for granted, they will be terribly misinformed.

One of the sub-asymmetries in our asymmetrically polarized politics is that Republicans exploit media aggressively, at every juncture, to smear, savage, and blame their opponents, while Democrats tend to steer away from collective character attacks. Their partisan appeals are rooted in policy and ideology, rather than in blunt assessments of the character of their organized opposition. To use less fancy language, Republicans say Democrats are shitty people; Democrats don’t return the favor.

To take just one example from this week: Pull up another browser window and Google something like “Republicans Biden screwworm.” Scan the headlines. Click through a few links.

What Republicans allege in these stories is biophysically impossible. The life-cycle of a screwworm is many times shorter than Donald Trump’s 509 days in office. But that is how Republicans roll.

To be clear, Democrats and liberals are doing the basic work of fact checking these false claims on social media and in other venues. But it typically does not occur to them to take the next step and fold the correction into a larger critique of Orwellian right-wing lying. What kind of people tell bald-faced lies as a matter of course? Bad ones.

There are several reasons for this, but here’s the one that concerns me most: Democrats decide what to talk about and how to say it on the basis of quantitative analysis. Republicans make the same determinations intuitively, through a more natural grasp of the human condition.

They place themselves in the shoes of lower-information voters, try to see the world from their perspective, and then ask: How can I make people like this develop a low opinion of Democrats? How can I instill hatred in them? When screwworm returns to the U.S. decades after liberals eradicated them, thanks entirely to Donald Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE, we tell the truth about it. But from there we expect that reality and evidence will do much of the work for us.

It surely will do most of the work for us. The story is simple. Trump cut screwworm monitoring, screwworm came back.

But Republicans view it as a cardinal objective to get as many of those affected as possible to hear a particular kind of made up story. Not just one that shifts blame, but that attributes blame to liberal villainy. That under Biden and the left, illegals crossed the border in record numbers, carrying screwworm larvae in their oozing wounds and sores. Yes, they want people who hear ‘we got screwworm because of Trump’ to respond, ‘huh, I heard it was because of Biden.’ Confusion serves their interests. But they also want those same confused people to accept the premise. Even if Democrats didn’t cause this screwworm infestation, they are grubby radicals who love open borders and don’t care about us.

I don’t think they’ll “win the argument” in the sense that most people in the affected region will believe that Democrats brought screwworm back to the U.S. But I do think the caricature will make a lasting impression—even on those who accept the factual truth about screwworm.

When elections are decided on the margin, that is a huge deal.

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There are three ramifications when Republicans propound these slanders.

One, my primary concern, is what turning the other cheek does to Democrats themselves. How it dampens intra-party morale and signals weakness to the broader electorate.

Another is civic. Is there any deterrence? If not, where does the ratchet end? Sometimes Republican lies fizzle. Sometimes they culminate in a violent insurrection.

But what I’m writing about here is the first order question. How do the lies shape sentiment in the middle. Republicans are terribly unpopular because they govern and behave in ways that are unappealing. Their indifference to truth is palpable. But the cost of lies isn’t merely to discredit liars. Republicans produce a ton of information, much of it derogatory, and it travels and lands in various places, then spreads like mold.

I don’t assume it’s a winning play, on net, for Republicans to lie about the Los Angeles mayoral election, or to use A.I. to depict James Talarico in a dress. All else equal, their political hand would probably be stronger if they behaved more normally and more ethically.

As I wrote here Republicans lose or eke out elections in large part because they’re stuck in a plurality trap that incentivizes them to behave in crazy ways to impress a large fanatical base. This inhibits their ability to appeal more broadly and grow into what might otherwise be a formidable popular majority.

But so long as they remain in this state of fevered far-right hatred, the question becomes: What’s the optimal way for Democrats to respond?

They could:

1. Lower themselves to the GOP’s level.

2. Fight fire with water.

3. Ignore the smears, and race to higher terrain.

You can usually bet on them to choose option three. And on a case-by-case basis, it’s easy to see why. Shouldn’t Talarico want to pivot away from trans rights, and ground his campaign in things like health care or screwworm or Ken Paxton’s corruption? Don’t California Democrats want to move on to their general elections?

My view, even in a case by case sense, is: Not necessarily. Brushing off character attacks conveys weakness, imposing no consequence for civic degeneracy frees Republicans to pull us all into the gutter. Joseph McCarthy did incredible damage to American civic space until someone finally shamed him in public.

But in a collective sense, non-response is a total disaster. It leaves us, in sum, with an information environment overrun with unrebutted lies, many of which will stick in the craws of voters who might otherwise open their hearts to Democrats.

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Obviously Democrats should not tell baseless lies about Republicans rigging or attempting to steal elections. They can tell the truth about it. About the insurrection and gerrymandering and all the rest. But we will not get out of this if Democrats start pretending to believe that, e.g., Ted Cruz stole the 2018 Senate election from Beto O’Rourke. That’s what Republicans do.

But there’s much in between sinking to the GOP’s level and pretending Republicans don’t exist.

They could stop preening and start making AI-generated ads depicting Ken Paxton’s actual sins and crimes. Or they could try to make Republican deception a liability in itself. I don’t mean correcting the record. I don’t mean citing fact-checkers. I mean telling stories about how today’s GOP professional class is defined by putrid, morally corrosive dishonesty.

In Talarico’s specific case, I hope he gives an approach like this some thought. I know it’s Texas. I know this is an incredibly rare and important opportunity, and he is in a dead heat. His advisers will surely tell him that getting into a partisan fight risks squandering it all. Most Texans are Republican after all. But they are Republican voters; not Republican operatives: Talarico is tied, or maybe slightly ahead, because a critical number of Republican voters can already see that something’s wrong with their party’s professional class.

Responding to the personal affront directly would address the innuendo by show and tell. It would help slow the mold-like spread of Republican lies. And, if more Democrats followed suit, the dividends would be invaluable. They’d begin the important work of rehabilitating the Democratic brand, and helping more voters in the middle see Republicans for what they are. Regular people will see them standing up for themselves, and Republican lies will no longer linger unrebutted, where they can do insidious damage.