As our government becomes more and more polarized, what can we do to ensure that facts and data hold out?
I’m not suggesting that lying should be illegal (in fact, it’s often unintentional), but when an MPs statement can later be proven to be false, shouldn’t they be forced to publicly apologize?
The truth shouldn’t be political.
I would go after non answers first, that’s what they do the most during the question period. If the speaker started throwing out MPs who don’t answer the questions they’re being asked you would see shit start to improve real quick.
Justin Ling recently published a report on polarization in Canada. He has a pretty good interview about it on CBC. What I got out of it:
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Truth is less important than pack mentality. With polarization, it matters that you’re showing you’re part of the in-group more than overall truthfulness. So a bell ringing when a lie is told probably wouldn’t help.
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Politicians follow social media trends, because that gets them clicks. That causes showboating in Parliament, since they get to use CPAC clips to their followers. But they don’t tend to lead the trends.
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MPs are under a lot of pressure to fundraise. Since union and corporate donations have been limited, MPs need to mobile their followers to send money. The best way to do that is with polarizing content on social media.
Outgoing Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said similar things in his final address to Parliament: MPs are chasing social media engagement, and that drives polarization.
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And how do you determine the truth, exactly?
There isn’t a magical bell that rings when someone lies. Science changes, public consensus changes, new facts surface, and opinions are just opinions.
Of course if an MP makes an easily disproven statement that’s one thing, but most things that could be said are complex and very hard to define as either true or false.
I don’t necessarily disagree that there should be extra checks for truth in politics, but I don’t really think there can be such a thing, objectively.
Straight up false statements(lies) and especially those with intent to deceive or persuade should be punished
Fact check. If someone fact checks you and finds that your statement was false then you are sanctioned. It doesn’t have to be a magic bell. If someone’s fact checking team looks into what you said and comes back the next day and says “point of order, what xyz said yesterday was a lie and here is the proof” they get a sanction.
Where does exaggeration fit? Anti-vaxxers play up vaccine side effects. They happen, but very very rarely. If an MP spends a bunch of time talking about them and saying a vaccine is risky, they haven’t made a false statement.
On top of that, the Right has made political hay saying the media and Snopes are biased against them. Parties here would do the same.
Yes, they always complain that the fact checkers are all leftists and biased but they never set up their own fact checking. Go ahead and fact check the truth, I fucking dare you. Even if they did the actual fact checkers would fact check their fact checking and expose their meta lies.
Maybe they should have a points system. Exaggeration could be marked on a scale. You get so many exaggeration points and you get a sanction.
It’s up to voters to hold politicians to account on this, but voters don’t and so why would they care about any other system that does.
If a politician says climate change is fake and they agree it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, they’ll just accuse the moderator of bias.
YES; punished by the electorate. The problem we have is, they don’t. In fact, they like to be lied to. The more scared they get, or the more privilege they enjoy, the more they want to be lied to.
One issue with this type of system is, who defines what the truth is? If it’s the government in power, then it’ll flipflop immediately whenever the other side wins. Any sort of “independent bureaucracy” would also gradually be undermined.
This is also ignoring that lying in the house of commons is likely not a major cause of political polarization, given that I imagine very few people actually watch the sessions of parliament. I would attribute the rise of political extremism mainly to decreasing quality of life, which arises from a combination of the housing crisis, heinous wealth inequality, and the looming specter of climate change. After all, if the status quo doesn’t work for the average person, they will naturally look for alternatives (or get politically disengaged). The right wing has the edge here, as they have a multi-billion dollar propaganda complex that is very effective at getting their word out, and they have no end of scapegoats to blame. The left has no such network, but we do have the benefit that most people aren’t massive racist assholes, and it doesn’t hurt that the actual facts back us up.
It is also worth noting that this type of polarization cannot be avoided under the system of capitalism, which broadly pits two groups against each other: the working class and the capitalist class. The working class broadly seek to live comfortably, to receive as much money as possible in pay, and to work no more than is necessary. The interests of the capitalist class run directly counter to this: they seek ever-increasing profits, and would like to pay the working class as little as possible and have them work as long as possible in exchange. This adversarial relationship can be overcome temporarily by a social contract that enacts high taxes on the capitalists to pay for a welfare state (note that even this arrangement does require exporting suffering to the global south through the mechanisms of imperialism, which I’m going to ignore for brevity), but eventually the drive for ever greater profits will drive the capitalists to destroy that social contract. Two relatively obvious examples of this are that wages have become stagnant for the last 50 years despite massive increases in productivity, and the movement to destroy public healthcare.
In sum: if we are to eliminate polarization, we must first eliminate capitalism. 😊
How do you take into account that someone told what they believed was true at the time although with limited knowledge, which then became false as the situation developed?
Intent is considered in the justice system, although sometimes hard to determine with 100% certainty.
Sometimes you need to make a decision NOW with partial information.
It’s not an admission of intent, but an admission of fact: that your statement was false.
Punishing the breaking of election promises would be a start. Those are not ambiguous or unintentional, and it should be punishable as a breach of contract.
Sometimes circumstances change and you can’t always follow through on your election promises. Imagine if someone had promised to run a balanced budget just before COVID. If they couldn’t spend money due to their promise, we wouldn’t get things like CERB, which would be much worse than breaking that promise.
In an ideal world, breaking an election promise would be political suicide so it just wouldn’t happen, but we’ve already seen that voters don’t care enough, and 4-5 years is a long time to run wild without any repercussions.
We need a way to hold politicians responsible, but making it illegal to break an election promise is probably not a good idea.
Then they should not make (what would then be) a legally binding promise. There should be a way that a claim can be made into a commitment with consequences, regardless of why it was broken. Sure, not every claim can be handled that way, but the option should exist.
Then you just get parties who don’t promise anything.
Look at Doug Ford’s 2018 election platform. Buck a beer and… nothing else. Look at the platforms for everyone who ran in your municipal election. I don’t know where you live, but if it’s anywhere like the cities I’ve lived in, the candidates don’t really have a platform, but occasionally make vague statements like “I’m would like to address issues with housing” or “we should do something about the homelessness problem”.
If every politician is given the choice between “vague statements that don’t mean anything” or “legal consequences if you promise to do this thing that you actually want to do but circumstances change and you can’t do it”, they’re going to go with “vague statements” every time.
As in contract law, the solution is to eliminate overarching or vague promises. Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan. Instead of promising elections reform, promise election reform pilot programs. And let’s not kid ourselves, election promises made in good faith are a rarity these days. It’s time to make it harder to lie to the electorate.
Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan
Many parties do produce a vague budget going into the election, but it still doesn’t account for unexpected events like the pandemic. And even though “balance the budget for 4 years” is a somewhat reasonable promise, creating a budget 4 years in advance is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Even just through the normal course of an uneventful term, things will change that the government has no control over, and if they can’t react by modifying their budget that they made several years ago, then that will cause a lot of problems.
And if their promise is something vague like “balance the budget” and there are legal consequences to not balancing the budget, then the government would be encouraged to sell of infrastructure in order to make up any deficit they may have accrued. That’s also bad.
