Truth, Fairness, and Dubious Tactics

The BBC recently ran a really interesting piece about Trump and Brett Kavanaugh borrowing from Bill Clinton:  "Brett Kavanaugh deploys the Trump and Clinton playbook."

As the article shows, all three (and Hillary too) used or are using the same tactic when confronted by scandal, which is to say framing the issue in terms of taking sides.  Not in terms of what the truth might be, what is fair, or what is moral, not even what's best for the country.  Just are you with me or against me.

Now, none of us should be surprised.  After all, most of our politicians started out as lawyers, and legal battles don't ultimately search for the truth, or what's fair, or equitable.  (If truth were primary, all evidence would be admissible; if fairness and equity were, the rich wouldn't be the only ones to hire the best attorneys.  But I digress.)  Everyone would like those to be the main goals, but the law is imperfect, and uses courtroom battles as a way of deciding issues as close to correctly as it can.

And that's fair enough, it's as good as we imperfect mortals can do.  But we need to remember that defense lawyers who get their guilty clients convicted will have as little career success as any other attorney who loses cases.

Anyone who wants to get anywhere as a lawyer has to put truth and fairness and equity into secondary priority, and win.

So we shouldn't be surprised when our politicians have the same mentality.

If you follow the news, the narrative is likely to suggest that American voters are fine with that, that everyone is increasingly polarized and uninterested in truth, fairness, and all the rest.  And certainly there's some truth to that.

But if you look back at the last election, turnout was something like 55%.  Granted that there will always be some who aren't paying attention or whatever, but I would suggest that some significant proportion of the US population, under 45% but still significant, doesn't see any better option than not voting at all.

So I can hope that at some point both parties stop and take a longer-term view, and start thinking in terms of engaging more than 55% of the population.  That they think about what's best for their party in the years to come, if not the nation, and stop focusing solely on winning their current case—I mean, election.

That's the truth as I see it, and I think it's a fair view of the overall situation.  But I doubt that dubious tactics will give way anytime soon.  I'm 55% sure of it.