Sen. Mitt Romney recently called serial liar Rep. George Santos a “sick puppy” and said the Long Island Republican didn’t “belong” in the House chamber in a heated exchange before President Biden’s State of the Union address.
The veteran Republican senator scolded the truth-averse freshman lawmaker for taking a prime and highly visible, center-aisle seat in the chamber as members of Congress piled in for Biden’s speech.
“You don’t belong here,” the Utah senator said to Santos, who has admitted to lying and is facing several investigations into his campaign finances. In a later interview, Romney told reporters: “I don’t know the exact words I said. He shouldn’t have been there. Look, he’s a sick puppy. He shouldn’t have been there.”
Romney’s remarks to the press indicate how far from any sense of ethics, decorum or honesty Santos has moved. Romney said: “I didn’t expect that he’d be standing there, trying to shake hands with every senator and the president of the United States. He should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet, instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room.”
Embellishing vs. lying
The most telling of Romney’s remarks might be: “He says that he embellished his record. Look, embellishing is saying you get an A when you get an A-minus. Lying is saying you graduated from a college you didn’t even attend.”
Sen. Romney’s comments about Rep. Santos were an old-fashioned example of “shaming.” Even 10 years ago, Romney’s shaming act would have struck fear in the heart of Santos. Such a time has disappeared from our democracy.
This turning from the value of shame in some situations is not the good some would insist. For example, parents form their children’s behaviors by shaming them around particular actions, clipping certain desires and allowing others to flourish.
The chisel that is used to sculpt civilized subjects is shame, which chips away at some desires and produces disciplined bodies.
The chisel that is used to sculpt civilized subjects is shame, which chips away at some desires and produces disciplined bodies. The loss of shame as a pedagogical tool can be seen as the advent of undisciplined, uncultured, ill-mannered and uncouth politicians who revel in shamelessness.
Kudos to Romney for calling a lie a lie. Romney will be caricatured as a moralist for insisting Santos should not be in Congress because he is a serial liar. Insisting on the truth from a member of one’s own party now turns out to be a liability, not a virtue. Sadly, Romney may end up being the outlier in his condemnation of the liar in the House of Representatives.
There’s a new political reality in Washington and across the nation. The irony is as deep and thick as it gets. Evangelicals, the driving force behind the rise of Donald Trump and the advent of lying as a political asset, have long been a people of morality. Now, people simply don’t care if someone is lying.
In Santos’ case, his lying is inconsequential because holding him accountable and booting him out of Congress — an act of political excommunication — probably would cost Republicans a seat in the House of Representatives. Protecting that slim majority is more important than holding Santos accountable for his lies.
People like lying
Here’s a novel analysis: I don’t think many people are put off by a politician lying because they like it. Because being able to pull off a bunch of lies and not being finished by it now passes as a sign of political strength. “You are the man.” Nobody can touch you. After all, your lies are “alternate facts,” “perfect phone calls,” “hyperbole.”
In our post-truth culture, there is an active despising of truth. The naïve habit of truth-seeking and truth-telling has lost its place at the table for many Americans.
Hook, line and sinker, our culture has devised a new ethical code. You can hear it at work in slogans we use as Christians.
Hook, line and sinker, our culture has devised a new ethical code. You can hear it at work in slogans we use as Christians.
“Who am I to judge another Christian? After all, when it is all said and done, we are all sinners.”
“It is up to each of us to do the best we can by loving one another. What I eat and with whom I sleep, therefore, is my business as long as I do not hurt anyone.”
“To be a Christian is not to get hung up on moralistic judgments but to care about those who have less than we have.”
My suspicion is that the whole country has gone liberal — in the sense of that loose, promiscuous, common form of liberalism — that plagues our secular age.
Richard Harvey Brown argues we have managed to turn the seven cardinal vices into the seven lively capitalist virtues. Borrowing from this construct, I suggest evangelicals and their political allies have managed to turn the seven cardinal vices into the virtues of winning, gaining power and being able to control everyone else.
Rewriting ethics
Historian Randall Balmer has noted, “America’s religious right is rewriting its code of
ethics:
- “Lying is all right as long as it serves a higher purpose.
- “It’s no problem to be married more than, well, twice.
- “Immigrants are scum.
- “Vulgarity is a sign of strength and resolve.
- “White lives matter (much more than others).
- “There’s no harm in spending time with porn stars.
- “It’s all right for adults to date children.
- “The end justifies the means.”
In a vapid ethical climate where it seems anything is acceptable, lying has become a routine political tool. We are so accustomed to politicians lying that we have devised defenses for our party’s lying politicians: “All politicians lie.” Lying is merely a tool — an innocent tool and form of exaggeration, a sort of terrifying entertainment.
Every day in Washington feels like the national convention of the International Liar’s Club. For instance, although Trump was the lyingest liar in the 2016 campaign, none of the candidates were 100% honest. Even the least deceitful candidates in the presidential campaign, regardless of party, lied about 25% of the time.
As voters, Americans have long accepted that politicians lie as part of the democratic bargain. Presumably, this is because candidates feel they have to pander to voters — and maybe even mislead voters in the process — in order to get elected. But even among politicians, Santos’ lying is unusual. He put his lies in writing on his resume.
Two wrongs …
When a politician is caught in a lie, his defenders drag up the lies members of the opposing party have told. The defense here is the improbable idea that “two wrongs make a right.”
There are no obvious political consequences for lying. Politicians have learned a valuable lesson. Lying works, plain and simple.
There are no obvious political consequences for lying. Politicians have learned a valuable lesson. Lying works, plain and simple. Part of the fault here is not so much with our blatant yet easy acceptance of lies, but with our growing mistrust of fact checkers and the media. In a world where facts don’t matter, where the media is considered a bunch of liars, who is going to notice if an elected official is a serial liar?
What has changed in our political climate to make such excuses for liars? The answer may surprise us. In previous decades, most of our politicians paid lip service to the importance of telling the truth. While this does come across as hypocritical, it is one time when the “appearance” of truth was an ethical stop gap for politicians. At least the lies weren’t so blatant. At least the lies didn’t provide the politician with more standing among voters.
Politicians were restrained by the pedagogy of truth-telling.
Pedagogy of shame
The other change is in previous decades, people caught in lies at least pretended to be ashamed. There was a pedagogy of shame that attached to telling lies. I have reached the conclusion that shamelessness has crippled our moral consciousness, specifically in relation to lying. The prospect of shame once frightened politicians into a more dignified approach.
“The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy,” Silvan Tomkins, a scholar of affect theory, writes. “Hence, any barrier to further exploration that partially reduces interest, or the smile of enjoyment will activate the lowering of the head and eyes in shame and reduce further exploration or self-exposure powered by excitement or joy.”
Since the dawn of the nation, Americans have assumed candidates and officials will accept the value of truth and act accordingly. Rhetorical scholar Ryan Skinnell says, “In this case, ‘accordingly’ means accepting shame if they are caught lying, changing their behaviors (at least outwardly), and maybe even leaving office, as in the cases of disgraced politicians such as Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich and Anthony Weiner.” That time has disappeared, no matter how honestly and how passionately Romney attempted to resurrect it.
The result? Nothing
Romney shamed Santos with searing words. The result? Nothing. No consequences. No outrage by an electorate demanding honesty. The only noticeable result was Santos firing back at Romney with a tweet bomb: “I think it’s reprehensible that the Senator would say such a thing to me in the demeaning way he said. It wasn’t very Mormon of him.”
The wall of expectation of truth-telling and good faith has been breached by the charade of shameless liars. Shame no longer appears to have any persuasive power. The world of political ethics has been turned upside down. If anything, the best liars now get away with lying, and the lying becomes more audacious.
A new breed of politicians has been created as an alternative politics to the politics of honesty. They concoct lies so blatant we believe they must be true as otherwise they are so absurd. Lies that lead us to believe that goodness can be achieved through lying.
The Anabaptist in me cries, “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”
Rodney Kennedy
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor in New York state and serves as a preaching instructor at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is the author of nine books, including the newly released The Immaculate Mistake, about how evangelical Christians gave birth to Donald Trump.
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