Truth was lost in the election. Americans must get it back.

[babylonsister]

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/312747-truth-was-lost-in-the-election-americans-must-get-it

Truth was lost in the election. Americans must get it back.
By Richard S. Grossman, contributor - 01/05/17 09:00 AM EST


snip//


We have never had someone quite like President-elect Trump, who spouts so many lies and, when confronted, doubles down and lies even more.

Among Trump’s biggest whoppers were that Obama was not born in the United States, that Obama and Hillary Clinton were co-founders of ISIS, that he could not release his taxes because he was being audited by the IRS, and that he actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” The list goes on and on.

Many of these lies were reported by the press in the months and weeks leading up to the election. The electorate—at least 48 percent representing majorities in states making up 57 percent of the electoral votes—were either not sufficiently troubled by these lies or were unaware that they were lies, to vote for another candidate.

What should the truth-loving public do going forward?

snip//

Finally, we need to care more about the truth. One of the most troubling aspects of the election was that so many people voted for Trump despite being fully aware of his many lies because “he shouldn’t be taken literally.” At the risk of sounding naive again, approaching national elections with the attitude that outright lies don’t matter does not bode well for the future of our democracy.

The best researchers are those who help advance the state of knowledge. Getting closer to the truth, even in small increments, is a worthy goal. Our democracy will be stronger if more voters take the truth more seriously. The more of us in the truth business, the better.



Richard S. Grossman is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and a professor of economics at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them.

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Americans have to want it back, first

Too many Americans are gullible fools.