Having watched the second US presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there was little doubt in my view as to who had the better of the argument. Trump was big on promises but Clinton far better on the facts. However, that does not mean all people thought that the Democratic nominee carried the day. It was classic rope-a-dope stuff. In fact, it reminded me of watching the middleweight boxer Herol Graham, who was extremely skilled in the art of ring craft. He was so evasive that before he turned pro, he used to make money in pubs by tying his hands behind his back and asking customers to try and lay a punch on him. He was so good that no-one ever got close. Until one day he got into the ring with Julian Jackson, one of the hardest punchers in the business, who hit poor Graham so hard he was unconscious before he even hit the canvas.
The question is can Clinton find a sucker punch to knock out Trump? Early on during Sunday’s bout, The Donald survived a few uncomfortable early rounds, but managed to come through the period when he was subject to criticism for misogynistic comments which would surely have felled many seasoned politicians. And I was amazed when the moderator, Anderson Cooper asked, “can you say how many years you have avoided paying personal federal income taxes?” Trump’s answer was, “No, but I pay tax, and I pay federal tax, too.” A politician who refuses to answer questions like that normally has no chance in an election. But like Herol Graham, Trump slipped the punch in a masterful fashion and it seems that whatever you throw at him, Trump keeps on coming. Welcome to the world of post-truth politics.
We have had our own experience of this phenomenon in the UK during the EU referendum campaign. It seemed not to matter what arguments were put forward – if they did not fit with the stylised “facts” which determined the nature of the campaign, then they were obviously “lies”. This clip, which shows Boris Johnson testifying before the Treasury Select Committee in March, highlights how the Brexit camp were able to distort the truth in ways which sound reasonable but were in fact a total misrepresentation of EU laws for the purposes of making a domestic political point.
Of course, the past master at truth distortion is Russian president Putin who, according to The Economist leads “arguably the country (apart from North Korea) that has moved furthest past truth, both in its foreign policy and internal politics.” It went on to note that during the Crimean campaign “state-controlled Russian media faked interviews with “witnesses” of alleged atrocities, such as a child being crucified by Ukrainian forces; Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, did not hesitate to say on television that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine, despite abundant proof to the contrary.”
The trust-your-gut instinct has been supported by a general erosion of trust in institutions and the proliferation of social media, which allows people to cut themselves off from those with different viewpoints and to hear only what they want to hear (so-called homophilous sorting). Such behaviour should (and does) worry economists. Although I argued recently that there is a strong normative element in economics, we rely very heavily on economic data to support our arguments. So when Trump tells American voters that “we’re the highest taxed nation in the world” he is way off. When he tells them he can eliminate the US national debt “over a period of eight years” while still pushing a "very big tax cut," he is living in fantasy land. When he says (as he did after winning the New Hampshire primary) that unemployment is "probably 28, 29, ... 35 percent; I even heard recently 42 percent," it’s pretty easy to go to the BLS website and see that they are reporting a figure around 5%. In plain terms, he is pandering to the prejudices of that part of the electorate which wants to believe that because things are not as rosy as they once were, they must be a lot worse than the government is telling them.
It was the same story during the Brexit referendum, when we were spun a web of lies based upon Michael Gove’s deceit that “people in this country have had enough of experts.” This led to a situation in which all the dire predictions of what Brexit might do to the economy were ignored because the fact that the UK runs a trade deficit with the EU “proves that the EU exports more to the UK than the UK does to the EU”. The fact that 47% of UK exports go to the EU whilst only around 16% of EU exports go in the other direction rather suggests the opposite. As the US politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
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