25th August 2025
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There are storytellers, and their stories will be told.
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Many – rightly -emphasise the lies told by illiberals, in particular the lies of President Donald Trump.
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“More than 7 years ago.”
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These lies are often in the service of things Trump’s supporters want to hear.
The lies are (false) versions of the reality that Trump supporters want to experience, accounts to help them make sense of the world.
The lies are, in essence, stories.
Trump is a storyteller, and his stories will be told.
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Some say that Trump has no sense of truth, that he is a post-truth politician.
This is a similar view to Trump being an anti-constitutionalist, that he wants constitution-free politics.
A closer view reveals that it is a lot more one-sided.
Trump has a keen sense of truth, when it suits him: he knows what things to say which make liberals uncomfortable about the facts, from “her emails” to “sleepy Joe”.
Similarly, Trump has a keen sense of what immunities and protections he has under the constitution of the United States.
Trump is a charlatan, not a nihilist.
For Trump, truth and constitutionalism are akin to a valve: they go one-way, and always the way which benefits him.
And if truth and constitutionalism do not benefit him, he lets them go.
Some of Trump’s stories are true, most of them are not true, and he tells whichever story is to his advantage.
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But there are other lies in politics, other than the thousands told by Trump.
This is a painful passage about UK politics in a recent post by Sam Freedman:
“[…] the state often isn’t very trustworthy and its failings are much more transparent than they used to be. If you’ve worked around government the differences between the cover-ups we’ve seen around the post office scandal, Grenfell or the grooming gangs and some of the wackier conspiracies, like the idea covid was an intentional plot or 9/11 was an inside job, are clear. In the first set of cases there were major institutional failures leading to people higher up the chain trying to cover themselves. They made some sense in terms of protective self-interest even though morally bankrupt. But there is no reason to try to poison the entire population with a vaccine, or to replace white people with non-white.
“It’s hardly surprising, though, that people already prone to distrust authority, confronted with regular scandals, find it hard to draw these lines, especially when they are getting affirmation from a likeminded group all the time.
“Nor is the issue just cover-ups. The establishment has been repeatedly caught off guard over the last few decades – whether in the false assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, missing the spectacular vulnerability of the global financial system in 2008, or initially implementing the wrong plans in the face of the pandemic.”
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No wonder that people prefer the stories they want to hear.
And it is no wonder that they prefer the politicians – Trump or Farage or so on – who will tell them those stories.
Few politicians – and certainly few political parties – have an absolute claim to what they say corresponding with what they will actually do.
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A recent book on the presidency of Joseph Biden sets out in convincing, accumulated detail how the White House set out to mislead the American voters about the mental health of the president.
Of course, in any and all circumstances a Biden presidency was preferable to a Trump one.
But.
Even that whataboutery does not take away that the stories the Americans were told about the infirmity of Biden did not correspond with reality.
Those in the Biden White House were storytellers – often to each other as well as to voters, and their stories were told.
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Looking at politics from the court room, where parties are placed on oath (or affirmation) and have to tell the truth on pain of perjury, the many lies in politics seem perhaps odd.
If only we could put politicians – and the media – under the same duty of honesty as witnesses in a legal case, everything will be ok, is the common thought.
And only if we could expose the lies, continues this thought, the voters will prefer the honest positions and not the dishonest positions.
Yet voters prefer the lies – even when they know (or should know) that they are lies.
Voters like stories.
Voters even like stories which go against their own material self-interest, or even against their own objective sense of reality.
Voters like the stories that affirm their view of the world, and of themselves and of other people.
Voters actually do not want to put politicians – and the media – under the same duty of honesty as witnesses in a legal case, even if they say they do when asked in an opinion poll or a vox pop.
Voters instead like the storytellers, and so they demand that stories will be told.
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The challenge for liberal and progressives is to go beyond exposing the lies of illiberals – and to go beyond telling their own lies.
The exposure of illiberal (and liberal) dishonesty is necessary, but it ain’t sufficient.
Liberals and progressives also need to have better stories about the world, and about how voters should see themselves and other people – stories of kindness and solidarity, rather than stories of cruelty and division.
Just as the Devil need not have the best tunes, Trump and Farage and so on do not have a monopoly on politically potent stories.
There are other storytellers, and their stories can also be told.
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