He is the right man for a democracy where winning matters more than anything else
lies of George Santos matter? Maybe some of Mr Santos’s constituents, in a district stretching along the North Shore of Long Island,in November because they were impressed he was a volleyball star at Baruch College and worked at Goldman Sachs, though none of that is so. Maybe they voted for him because he claimed to be Jewish, though he says now, with Seinfeldian sangfroid, that he meant only that he was “Jew-ish”.
This is why the outrage of the press and the Democrats over Mr Santos is so poignant. Since he ran again, and won, they have not just torn away his veil of autobiographical humbug but turned his deceit into a national scandal. Yet given Mr Trump’s enduring success at warping reality, this blow for justice seems even less satisfying than catching Al Capone for tax evasion. It is more like hounding one of Capone’s accountants for jaywalking.
“In law and in journalism, in government and in the social sciences, deception is taken for granted when it is felt to be excusable by those who tell the lies and who tend also to make the rules,” Sissela Bok, a philosopher, wrote in her landmark book “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life”. Writing in the late 1970s after the deceptions of Watergate and the Vietnam war, Ms Bok was trying to make sense of the collapse of trust in American institutions.
Without trust in veracity—“a foundation of relations among human beings”—institutions collapse, Ms Bok wrote. She placed particular responsibility for the fraying of trust on politicians, partly because political lies, even when thought trivial by those who tell them, spread so far and are so widely imitated. “When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily,” she wrote.
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