Simple and Honest

Here’s the best idea I’ve seen for a while.

Matthew Yglesias is a writer who has bounced around several prominent national news journals. In late 2020, he left Vox and started his own self-published site on Substack — a change that ensured he could say what he wants without editors slicing away words that might offend advertisers or political allies. Yglesias is trying to make a living by selling subscriptions directly to readers.

Yglesias’ recent column is titled, “Making Policy for a Low-Trust World.” He writes:

The United States of America has become a country with low and falling levels of social trust. This is in some ways a rational response to elite failures, in some ways an inevitable consequence of the public becoming better educated, in some ways an unavoidable side effect of better information technology, and in some ways a deplorable thing that we should try to reverse.

But something I’ve become increasingly convinced of is that policymakers need to acknowledge that it’s a real feature of the landscape and adjust their decision-making accordingly.

There’s an important distinction there. Trust can be a virtue, but not always. Trusting a cheater or a liar is not a virtue. So for trust to be a social good, two things are necessary. The leaders have to speak the truth, and the people have to be willing to believe.

The adjustment that is called for, he says, is for public policy makers to say, in the clearest words possible, what they intend to do. And then they should do that. As an example of someone doing what they say, he points to this honest advertisement:

The goal of saying only the simple truth would be a high bar for American politicians and public leaders. They haven’t tried very hard to do that. Until 1947, the US government admitted to itself and everyone else that the purpose of armies and weapons is to fight and win wars. The government agency in charge of armies and weapons was the War Department. After 1947, the name changed to the Department of Defense. The job didn’t change and the resources the office manages didn’t change. And there was not some sudden change in American citizens' attitude that war was no longer acceptable or winning wars no longer desirable. No, the change in the name was just a case of government preferring a deceptive word over a simple, honest one.

Parson Weems’ Fable, by Grant Wood

You might expect further recent examples of politicians playing loose with the truth, but the most scandalous case of twisting the truth in American history goes back to George Washington. You’ve no doubt heard the tale that when Washington was a boy, he chopped down his father’s cherry tree and then admitted what he’d done because he was such an honest boy.

You may not have known that the story was made up by a man named Parson Weems and first appeared in Weems’ 1809 book. The Life of Washington. Weems believed that truthfulness was very important — so important that he conjured up a lie and then worked to make all the children in America believe it.

Weems thought that believing the lie could make those children grow into better citizens. Hundreds of politicians and public officials since then have also believed that lying would help them maintain public support while they took some unpopular but necessary action. And sometimes that is right. In the days leading up to WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt continued to talk like the US would stay neutral, while he made necessary preparations to join the war.

The trouble is, public trust in 2021 has dissolved to the point that the public doesn’t believe anything. Some minority share will believe anything. But the larger consensus needed to make major efforts (e.g., covid-19 vaccinations, presidential transitions, reform of police procedures) successful just doesn’t exist. As Yglesias explains in his column, leaders can’t continue to expect public support. They’ve lost it. So they have to make policy differently than they might if they enjoyed the public trust.

It will take a while for elected officials, most of whom are lawyers and trained to fudge their words, to learn to speak honestly and simply and truthfully. But citizens can begin immediately to speak honestly ourselves. And whenever we encounter a politician talking not the strict truth, we can ask for a correction of clarification.