essays
Would Factual Politics Be So Crazy?
Could our leaders maybe mislead us just a little less?
There goes Joe. Dropping some last presidential falsehoods about his son and inflation on the way out. Now we’re off to another season of The Apprentice President. Leading the cast of amateur politicians, an orange conman, scamming the nation with lies of salvation. But let’s assume for a second the whole thing wasn’t just a reality show – and that the actual sum total of Trump’s first term were a dizzying 30,573 falsehoods and misleading claims, as in 21 per day, which you’d be hard-pressed to come up with if it was your main occupation – why would anybody who lives in the real world put up with misleading leaders? We wouldn’t put up with family members, friends, or coworkers if they dropped bullshit wherever we stepped. Why do we let those in the highest offices walk all over the lowest bars?
Now, I don’t suggest we raise the bar all the way to the ceiling – politics is not science and there is room for opinion, ideology, and overexaggerations in senate halls. But shouldn’t we hold politicians to facts wherever the data is in?
If Donald were to hop onto the flat-Earther train to Loontown, shouting the words “sphere-hoax” and claiming that we need to build a wall around the world’s edges to save folks from falling off, we would laugh the guy out of office.
But when that orange clown (yes, the guy is orange, that’s fact) delivers his trademark climate-hoax routine, quite a few of us applaud his denial of overwhelming scientific evidence. We let someone’s pseudo-political beliefs inform policy no matter how hair-raisingly at odds with the facts. What’s the difference between someone who denies Earth’s curvature and someone who denies its manmade warming? Less than we might think and that’s the problem. While data shows that the public estimates the scientific consensus on climate change to be as low as 65 % (in the UK), the (f)actual degree of agreement lies snugly between 98.7–100% (among the world’s most qualified scientist the consensus is unanimous). That’s flat-Earth rejection levels. Of course, you can still be of such flat opinions (and a growing subculture is); however, your opinion would be wrong. Yes, opinions can be wrong.
"Policy shouldn’t be based on ludicrous off-chances. The stakes are too high for politicians to be full-tilt gamblers."
If you ask a dictionary, the antonym of opinion is fact. One could argue that opinion is everything that isn’t a 100%-waterproof-airtight fact. However, it might be more reasonable to argue that true opinion lives at the 50/50 intersection where there is absolutely no right or wrong (think coin toss), while fact lives up the road at 100 % certainty. And that within the neighborhood of opinion, not all opinions are equally valid. Even with the most generous room for climate doubts on the short 98.7–100% spectrum, the odds of being right are at a very skinny 1.3 %, while there’s a fat 98.7 % chance of that opinion being wrong. The chances of Trump and his lemmings being right might be as low as 0,00 %. Let me throw in two exclamation points for good measure: zero!! And yet, the executive order to pull out of the Paris agreement has already been signed with an orange middle finger on day one of term two. Policy shouldn’t be based on ludicrous off-chances. The stakes are too high for politicians to be full-tilt gamblers. And in a globalized world, where neither decisions nor emissions stop at borders, a misplaced bet by one player is shouldered by all. American withdrawal from climate accords has global consequences, seeing that the US is the world’s second largest carbon emitter (after China).