Democracy is complex. It thrives on disagreement, debate, and passionate arguments about a nation’s direction and the values guiding us. But what happens when the foundation of that debate — truth itself — becomes optional?
When politicians can lie without consequence and misinformation becomes widespread (advantageous or rewarded), the public loses trust in democratic institutions, can be tricked into voting against their best interest and values, and nonsensical policies are implemented.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once dryly noted: “Truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.”
No kidding. Right now, truth and politics in the United States seem to be not only on bad terms. They appear to be in open warfare. It is a war that can feel inevitable.
Whenever politics gets really heated, reason often seems to go out the window.
“And yet, the pursuit of truth is absolutely crucial for democracy,” wrote Monica Vilhauer in Psychology Today. “Despite all the barriers that exist in our way — social media, lying politicians, a decaying journalistic culture, and even human psychology — citizens in a democracy must find ways to distinguish what’s true from what’s false. Democracy is at stake.”
Conventional wisdom has it that for democracy to work, it is essential that we, the citizens, agree in some minimal way about what reality looks like. We are not, of course, all required to think the same way about big questions, or believe the same things, or hold the same values; in fact, it is expected that we won’t. But somehow or other, we need to have acquired some very basic, shared understanding about what causes what, what’s broadly desirable, what’s dangerous, and how to characterize what’s already happened.
But citizens can’t have reasons for what they believe if the government prevents them from finding out what’s true or false. That’s why a government, even an elected government, becomes less democratic to the extent that it ceases caring about truth.
“Democracies rarely fall in a single moment; they erode through a thousand small silences that go unchallenged,” wrote Carolyn Goode in Fulcrum. “When citizens can no longer see or hear the truth — or when leaders manipulate what the public is allowed to know — the foundation of selfgovernment begins to crack long before the structure falls.”
Goode added, “When truth becomes negotiable, democracy becomes vulnerable — not because citizens stop caring, but because they stop receiving the information they need to act.”
The framers wrote the First Amendment because they understood the danger of leaders who try to control information. They had lived under a government that censored newspapers, punished criticism, and used fear to silence dissent. So they wrote a simple, absolute command: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. They were not protecting journalists as a profession; they were protecting the people’s right to know what their government is doing.
Yet today, we are watching the very scenario the framers feared. Leaders who dislike scrutiny increasingly turn to a familiar strategy: discredit the press so the public will distrust the facts.
They label critical reporting as “fake,” call journalists names, question their motives, and attack their credibility. These tactics are not spontaneous; they are strategic. They are designed to weaken the institutions that hold power accountable and to convince citizens that only the leader can be trusted.
Democracies do not collapse in silence. Citizens hear what is happening. They see what is happening. The danger is not that the public is unaware — it is that leaders work to distort, deny, or drown out what the public witnesses. When noise replaces information and denial replaces accountability, leaders can act without scrutiny.
If leaders cannot tell the truth, they should at least refuse to lie. If they cannot answer a question, they should not attack the person asking it. If they cannot be transparent, they should simply say, “No comment at this time,” rather than distort, dehumanize, or deny.
“Truth is a public good — and when it is weakened, the entire civic ecosystem suffers,” Goode warned. “A nation that cannot see or hear the truth cannot remain a democracy.
But a people who insist on truth — who demand transparency, challenge misinformation, and hold leaders accountable — will always have the power to protect it, and to pass it forward.”
The issue is not just professional spinners talking about “alternative facts” or the current U.S. president bending the truth and spreading conspiracy theories at every turn, from mass rallies to X social network rants.
The deeper problem stems from the growing sense we all have that today even hard evidence of the kind that used to settle arguments about factual questions won’t persuade people whose political commitments have already led them to the opposite conclusion.
Rather, citizens now belong to “epistemic tribes”: One person’s truth is another’s hoax or lie. Just look at how differently those of different political leanings interpret the evidence of global warming or the conclusions of the Mueller Report on Russian involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
We’ve gotten to the point now that many people are convinced that the boundaries between truth and untruth are, in the end, as subjective as everything else. It is all a matter of perception and spin; nothing is immune, and it doesn’t really matter.
For our democracy to survive, truth must matter as a form of collective aspiration. We need to progress away from lies and propaganda and spin, and toward a truer and more consensual view of reality, however elusive. Only then can we begin to close the perilous distance between the promises of democratic ideals and the fractured realities in which we actually live and govern.
Dr. William Kolbe, an Andover resident, is a retired high school and college teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga and El Salvador. He can be reached at bila.kolbe9@gmail.com.