One day this past summer when I arrived at work, several of my coworkers were laughing about a news article describing a press conference of then-gubernatorial candidate for Illinois, Bruce Rauner. To demonstrate the state’s wasteful spending, Rauner brought three caged chickens to the conference and said, “We have spent over $100,000 flying chickens into our state. We have plenty of chickens in our state…” My co-workers laughed not because they thought bringing chickens into a press conference was ludicrous, but because Rauner’s statement was incredibly misleading, if not an outright lie.
The program Rauner referred to brings state-endangered prairie chickens into Illinois to bolster the rapidly declining population. Needless to say, a prairie chicken is not the same as a domesticated chicken, and there certainly are not “plenty” of prairie chickens in the state of Illinois (recent surveys put the population around 100). Regardless of the effectiveness or necessity of the relocation program, Rauner deliberately attempted to mislead voters. Rauner’s statement exemplified the problem with politics in our country today.
The tendency for politicians to mislead voters permeates our political discourse. I point specifically to Governor-elect Bruce Rauner not because he is exceptionally guilty, but because we tend to forget that this problem does not solely occur on the left. Both parties are often equally guilty and although exceptions exist, this tendency has polluted national political discussion. Consequently, informed voters must choose between untrustworthy candidates when they go to the ballot box, fostering the general mistrust the American public holds toward the political system.
Despite the negative reactions of informed voters to these misleading statements, politicians continue to make them for one simple reason: It works. Most Americans do not pay enough attention to the political world to recognize when a politician is misleading them. This is not to claim that most Americans are unintelligent, but that they are rationally ignorant. Unfortunately, politicians can easily take advantage of this rational ignorance. The number of rationally ignorant voters far exceeds the number of informed voters, meaning that even if politicians’ actions anger some voters, many more will accept those politicians’ lies.
Additionally, many Americans fail to recognize the flaws within their own party. Too often, people criticize the lies told by the other party only to accept blindly the faulty statements of the politicians they support. As long as people are unwilling or unable to recognize and punish lying politicians, their lies will persist.
This problem will not be easy to solve. To do so, we must change the fundamental incentives within politics. Rational ignorance is embedded into our country by a variety of economic incentives and it is not realistic to expect it to change. Normally, the media would be a natural solution, as they are capable of calling out politicians who mislead the public, but media have become so politicized that almost all news organizations suffer from the same problem as politicians. However, there does appear to be cause for hope: The American people are fed up with being misled by their political leaders. Favorable signs are beginning to emerge even from last week’s election. For example, voters rejected the liberal lie that Republicans are waging a war on women. Additionally, in the aftermath of the election, both parties have signaled their willingness to cooperate, which would necessitate a toning-down of political rhetoric. Honesty is hard to find in politics, but it is exactly what we need.
