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What Trump and the Brexiters have shown is that our democracy, our common politics, our checks and balances all rest at a pretty fundamental level on the assumption that people will be honest. 1/
It& #39;s clear that our broadcasters and print media are ill-equipped to deal with the volume and intensity of lies we& #39;ve experienced. Actually I think we& #39;re all ill-equipped to deal with it. It& #39;s hard not to normalise it, and slowly it feels less outrageous and more laughable. 2/
The BBC& #39;s problem with Brexit is that it& #39;s idle to say you can be impartial between sides but not impartial about the truth, when one side& #39;s position is pretty much entirely based on lies. 3/
It& #39;s the same with Trump. The Washington Post has counted around 14,000 false claims that Trump has made as President. But there are diminishing returns to this. Frankly if he& #39;s lied 14000 times, why not 15000? It makes no difference. We& #39;re used to it. 4/
When Michael Gove turns up to a studio demanding to join a Channel 4 debate that& #39;s for party leaders and then pretends that Channel 4 have done something outrageous in not letting him on, how do you react? How can you get out of the he-said she-said problem? 5/
The deeper problem of degrading the political process is that it& #39;s a political strategy. By lying so wantonly you ironically help the lies work, because people can& #39;t be bothered to distinguish any more, they disengage, making us more prey to the vague circulation of lies. 6/
The Impeachment hearings have revealed Trump& #39;s astonishing corruption. But they& #39;ve also revealed how relatively weak Congress is as a bulwark against that corruption, how easy it is for a man of monstrous bad faith to bypass it. 7/
With Brexit, I veer between tiring, desperate hope (surely we will see sense) and a kind of catastrophism (fine, let& #39;s crash out and see how much you fucking like it then). Neither position gets me anywhere. 8/
Really I wonder if and how we can recover from the last three years. Will there come a moment where our political leaders just start being better people? I don& #39;t mean they need to be saints; just generally, basically fairly honest and honourable. 9/
Or do we somehow put in place more formal safeguards against the men of ill will? It feels necessary but I am concerned about that. (a) it reifies the idea of the political leader as a liar who needs to be constrained. Is not a general consensus about truthfulness preferable? 10/
(b) a set of statutory regulations are something to get round. They will have loopholes (because they will not imagine the person of even worse faith). It& #39;s less easy to get round the principle that you should be a decent person. 11/
