• Vaccines cause autism
• Tax cuts pay for themselves
• Poor people caused the financial crisis
Each of these is, of course, wrong and lacking in any factual basis. Nevertheless, they have a following. Now, you can add Brexit to the list. Watching from across the Atlantic, it was a wonder to see the stream of claims that failed to stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.
Perhaps the biggest was the assertion by Nigel Farage, the loudest advocate for Brexit and leader of the U.K. Independence Party, that leaving would free up 350 million pounds ($460 million) a week that now goes to the EU for use by Britain’s financially stretched National Health Service. Farage was forced to backtrack on this claim almost immediately. He was successful at frightening people with claims about immigration that he also was forced to “row back.”
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, there is evidence that people didn’t fully understand what they were voting for. Some didn’t think their protest vote would matter, or misunderstood what they were voting for, or what the EU actually was. There seems to be a rise in voters’ remorse the days after. Many blamed the tabloids in the U.K.. The misstatements and myths which were being pressed by the leave campaign about the EU were so rampant and absurd that the European Commission had to put out repeated corrections and maintain a blog to rebut the nonsense.
Democracy is based on the concept of a marketplace of ideas. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described the “free trade in ideas” within “the competition of the market.” By the time voters head to the polls, the participants will have chewed over the finer points, the details will be well known to all and, for the most part, everyone more or less understands what’s at stake.
Or not.
The assumption underlying policy debates -- their true purpose in a democracy -- is to engage in a principled argument in order to reach a discernible truth. It isn’t, as we have seen more and more often, to win a short-term victory at any and all costs .
Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” That was never truer than today, when falsehoods and Facebook hoaxes can travel around the world at the click of a mouse.
Hyperbole and exaggeration is one thing, creating an alternative universe is something else entirely.