The Post-Truth era, in which we all now exist, it seems we have to also get used to a heightened level of political aggression and game-playing. Politicians are apparently happy to take greater risks with outright lies, half-truths, misdirection and gaslighting.
In my four decades of writing about politics in many different countries, I can’t remember a time when shameless dishonesty was so rife. Sadly, many seem to be getting away with it and like a child with a new toy are delighting in it as it appears to make little, or no, difference to their political standing.
It seems like a revelation to them, and they are revelling in it. It has emboldened some to behave as they like and take even greater political risks with their lies.
"All is fair in love, war and politics", is a much used proverb when discussing the machinations which go on in the political world. While deeply cynical, it is nonetheless at least partly true.
Look at former US president Donald Trump. His litany of years of lies and bad behaviour - not least the Big-Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him - has gradually descended into unbalanced ravings. His call for the US Constitution to be torn up so he can be simply reinstalled into the White House, is as outrageous as it is mindblowing.
Happily his antics look like they are finally backfiring on him and President Biden now leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup, 47 percent to 40 percent. Plus, Two-thirds of Republican and Republican leaning voters want Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to run for President in 2024. (Personally I’m not sure which one is worse, but that’s another matter.)
But such behaviour has emboldened the likes of Republican Kari Lake to flatly refuse to accept she lost the 2022 Arizona governor race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, a move which led one US publican to describe her as the “saddest dead-ender” and someone who has “doubled down on a losing bet: election denial.”
There are others like gun-toting Republican Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, notorious for fueling anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, support for the Big-Lie and being an insurrectionist sympathiser. Likewise Georgia Republican representative the crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene with her Space Lasers, Political Murders, and Muslims Taking Over America. All truly bizarre stuff if you can be bothered to check into what exactly she said.
Take the brutish Boris Johnson in the UK. His bravado and disdain for the public led to him telling lie after lie, a strategy which eventually caught up with him and he was deposed as leader of the ruling Conservatives. He is still under investigation by a Commons committee over whether he misled the UK Parliament.
Again, this has bred contempt for the truth with Secretary of State Michael Gove claiming the UK had secured GBP800 billion in “new free trade deals'' since leaving the European Union.
Which is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts because the bulk of this figure is not “new” trade and he has since been reprimanded by The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) which has warned the ruling Conservatives that they should provide sources for such figures in the future.
These are just recent examples of shameless dishonesty in politics which have ‘come home to roost’ but it is nevertheless a worrying trend that such outrageous behaviour is on the rise and lying is becoming ‘part of the political game’.
It’s easy to identify such trends here in Taiwan with some politicians feeling it is OK to ape some of the more outrageous behaviour we are witnessing abroad. That’s not to say it is anything new, but it does seem such practices are on the rise.
For example Terry Guo who has said Taiwanese people have no choice of which Covid vaccine they have, which is a clear lie. He also said the Government didn’t care whether people lived or died during the pandemic which I would class as not only a lie but also the dirtiest of political game playing. Of course the government cares whether people live or die.
While the atrocious behaviour of the likes of Trump and Johnson did catch up with them in the end, it nevertheless propelled them to power in the first place and for a while afterwards they made political capital out of it.
Politics is a dirty business, and, like boxing, is aggressive, confrontational and sometimes nasty but should be played to a set of rules. Outright lies, misdirection and gaslighting should play no part in a civilised society.
Which brings us to the opposite situation. What happens when politicians act in a decent way, are broadly honest and try to behave in a respectful way towards voters? The answer is they tend to lose out to those who think they can behave badly and break the unwritten rules and maybe even appear to be weak.
There really needs to be an element of fighting fire with fire, with lies quickly called out just as aggressively as they were told in the first place. That is not something I see happening often in Taiwan. The government response to recent outrageous comments have been left unanswered for hours, sometimes days by which time the lie, or comment, is planted firmly in people’s minds and it is too late.
Winston Churchill once said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
At least responding to that lie quickly lessens its impact and maybe stops it in its tracks. Waiting hours to come back with a rebuttal is simply not good politics.
It’s also noticeable that the current administration appears not to think too hard about the way they deliver their messages. An excellent example of this is their latest budget announcement on Facebook.
It led with TWD111 billion to pay back government debt and towards the end it announced TWD577.3 billion more local government spending and more cash for education, infrastructure, defence and environment.
This was a golden opportunity to lead with the good news of more spending on all the things people care about and push the budget payback to the bottom, or even not have it as part of the highlights at all. It would have been the smart way to handle it politically.
But it backfired hugely as people latched on to the relatively small 111 billion figure and likely didn’t even read down far enough to find the much bigger 577.3 billion figure before they waded in with criticism. It even broke the first rule of journalism which is to lead with the bigger more important figure.
That’s just one example but it’s fairly typical of the DPP and its somewhat passive approach to politics. Plus, the opposition parties are far more aggressive and emboldened in the Post-Truth era by the behaviour they see tolerated elsewhere in the world.
With a presidential election just over a year away the current administration should perhaps think harder about their apparently relaxed and passive stance on the political battlefield and take a close, hard look at the way they make better political capital out of their successes.
Tinkerty Tonk...
