Can we handle the truth?

"Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

You’ve heard this in a hundred courtroom dramas, and perhaps in an actual courtroom. Witnesses regularly swear they will, under penalty of perjury if they don’t.

But is it ever taken seriously? Yes, direct lies can get you in trouble. But the whole truth? What does that even mean?

Witnesses are not required to volunteer information. In many cases they’re encouraged not to volunteer information. It’s up to the prosecution and the defense to ask the right questions. If they don’t, parts of the truth don’t get told. 

The question pertains beyond the courtroom. Most people reasonably distinguish between actual falsehoods intended to deceive and simple silence. I shouldn’t say something I know to be untrue, but I don’t have to say everything I know. If I don’t like a gift someone gives me, I shouldn’t say I do like it. But I don’t have to say I hate it.

The issue grows more complicated when people say things they don’t mean and expect us to know they don’t mean them. Exaggeration for effect is often understood as such. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!” If Roy Rogers ever said that, Trigger needn’t have worried.

Sometimes things are said for the purpose of inspiring hope. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address. This was patently untrue. Millions of Americans had to fear hunger, homelessness and the other troubles caused by the Great Depression. But FDR’s phrase sounded good, and seems to have allayed some Americans’ well-founded fears.

Roosevelt wasn’t the first politician to fit truth to necessity. But he was better at rationalizing it than others. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he said on the eve of the 1940 election. James Roosevelt, one of his adult sons, later asked him about this. James knew where Roosevelt’s policies were headed, and he knew his father did too. “I had a conversation with Father, in which I discussed the dishonesty of his stand on war,” James wrote. “Father said, ‘Jimmy, I knew we were going to war. I was sure there was no way out of it. I had to delay until there was no way out of it. I knew we were woefully unprepared for war, and I had to begin to build up for what was coming. But I couldn’t come out and say a war was coming, because people would have panicked and turned from me.’” The truth would have been a gift to his rivals. “Sometimes you have to deny your political opposition the paint they need to present the public picture of you they want to show. You can’t feed your enemies ammunition.”

Roosevelt wasn’t punished for lying in what he considered a worthy cause. On the contrary, he is commonly judged one of America’s greatest presidents. His guiding an isolationist America into World War II is hailed as his master stroke.

Yet the currency of truth isn’t devalued without consequence. We’ve reached a condition where political candidates and parties regularly say things that prove untrue, and they aren’t held to account. Roosevelt promised to balance the federal budget, did just the opposite, and was reelected three times. Ronald Reagan said he was the serious one about reining in the federal debt, and he doubled the debt, in real terms, during his eight years in office. He is often considered the second greatest president of the 20th century, after Roosevelt.

Donald Trump is the current exemplar of truth’s devaluation. Presidents before Trump felt obliged to convey consistency. If they said or did something that contradicted a previous statement or action, they or their surrogates tried to explain away the discrepancy. Instinctively or by calculation, Trump recognized that this was a losing strategy for him. He might never have read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” but he embodied its most-quoted adage: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Not for Trump consistency, foolish or otherwise. Trump has been on both sides of such issues as abortion, cryptocurrency, social media and immigration. His supporters seem unfazed. When he says something outrageous or that they merely disagree with, they chalk it up to Trump being Trump. They place their confidence in the man, not in any particular thing he says.

From his perspective, this will prove to have been a brilliant strategy if it gets him elected again. He will reenter office with a free hand, something every president wants but few get. 

But it doesn't reflect well on democracy. And we voters have only ourselves to blame. For decades we've let candidates treat us as children, unable to bear the truth. In 1984, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale said he would raise taxes if elected. The soaring deficit required it. Incumbent Reagan, responsible for the deficit, mocked Mondale and said he, Reagan, would not raise taxes. Mondale lost in a landslide. Reagan raised taxes. And neither Reagan nor the Republicans paid a price.

The rest of us have been paying the price ever since. We elect candidates and have little idea what they will do in office. No wonder so many Americans are disillusioned with democracy. If we can't handle the truth, we won't get the truth.