{"id":17426,"date":"2016-09-26T13:08:45","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T17:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17426"},"modified":"2016-11-22T13:33:20","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T18:33:20","slug":"what-people-mean-when-they-say-that-trump-or-clinton-is-honest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17426","title":{"rendered":"what people mean when they say that Trump or Clinton is honest"},"content":{"rendered":"

It flabbergasts many people to learn<\/a>\u00a0that more Americans view\u00a0Trump rather than Clinton as “honest and trustworthy” (35% versus 33%),\u00a0even though we can read in The New York Times,<\/em>\u00a0“A Week of Whoppers from Donald Trump”<\/a>; in The Washington Post,<\/em>\u00a0“Trump\u2019s Week Reveals Bleak View, Dubious Statements in ‘Alternative Universe<\/a>‘”; and in\u00a0The\u00a0Los Angeles Times,<\/em>\u00a0“Scope of Trump’s Falsehoods Unprecedented for a Modern Presidential Candidate<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

In philosophy school, you learn to make distinctions, and I think two distinctions may be useful for interpreting the public’s response. First, “truthfulness” can mean:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Saying what is true.<\/em> Because they envision\u00a0truths as claims consistent with evidence, many fact-checkers compare candidates’ assertions\u00a0to government data and public\u00a0records or to academic research. For instance, Donald Trump has said that Lester Holt, the debate moderator, is a Democrat, but official\u00a0records show that Holt is a registered Republican. The Times<\/em> calls\u00a0that a “whopper.” I am confident that Hillary Clinton’s\u00a0claims are far more often verifiable than Donald Trump’s, and in that sense, she is more truthful and trustworthy.<\/li>\n
  2. Investing skill and effort in finding the truth.\u00a0<\/em>If truth is correspondence to some independently verifiable\u00a0reality, then a person could\u00a0say something\u00a0true–or false–by accident. We can\u00a0also err when we fact-check. But\u00a0some people truly\u00a0strive<\/em> for truth. They are careful not to opine on matters for which they lack evidence, they listen to alternative views, they complicate their positions when they encounter contrary evidence, they may even seek<\/em> contrary evidence, and they select appropriate methods for answering empirical questions. They can still be wrong, but they have a respectful\u00a0attitude to truth. I am confident that Hillary Clinton is a much more dedicated and skillful truth-seeker than Donald Trump is, although one could raise serious criticisms<\/a> of her truth-seeking in episodes like her\u00a0vote to authorize the Iraq War (when she had privileged access to intelligence) or her endorsement<\/a> of the “super-predator” theory of crime.<\/li>\n
  3. Speaking\u00a0what is in your mind.<\/em>\u00a0For many people, honesty and truthfulness mean candor, sincerity, or forthrightness. Provoked by tricky Odysseus, guileless Achilles exclaims, “I hate like the Gates of Hell a\u00a0man who says one thing and thinks\u00a0another in his mind!” A candid straight-shooter can say lots of things that are false, either by accident or because he’s not a good truth-seeker<\/em>. If he\u00a0really, truly thinks that taxes are higher in the US than any\u00a0other country, he looks you in the eyes and says so. Judged by\u00a0that third standard, I am not sure whether Trump is “honest.” Although he\u00a0may be guileful, it’s at least plausible\u00a0that he blurts out\u00a0what he really thinks, reflecting an ideological\/normative worldview that he genuinely holds. Sometimes he even says things that cost him tactically because they make him look dumb or alienate a specific voting bloc that might\u00a0have preferred him. And just for that reason, lots of people think he’s “honest.” As for Hillary Clinton, I perceive that she thinks many\u00a0things in her mind and puts them through a very careful screen before she speaks\u00a0aloud. Voters\u00a0are sensitive to that kind of processing. They take slip-ups, like her\u00a0“deplorables” comment, to be\u00a0glimpses\u00a0of a hidden stratum of sincere beliefs. This is what some have in mind when they call Trump more honest than Clinton.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    <\/a>

    “He tells it like it is”<\/p><\/div>\n

    My own view would be something like this: Truth-seeking is an important virtue for political leaders. It raises the odds that leaders\u00a0will know the actual truth, although I’d forgive any human being for making errors if she demonstrates both commitment and skill in her truth-seeking.<\/p>\n

    Politicians should also demonstrate some candor. To struggle to know the truth and then to say something less than, or different from, the truth in\u00a0public is not very democratic. On the other hand, politics isn’t a seminar room, a lab, or a witness stand in a court of law. Other\u00a0political virtues may\u00a0conflict with candor, such as tact, diplomacy, privacy, national or global\u00a0security, and sheer effectiveness. A political leader must strive to enact and change\u00a0policies, and it can undermine her\u00a0effectiveness if she\u00a0says everything she\u00a0believes. I am pretty sure that’s why Clinton talks as she does, but because many people equate truthfulness with candor, she pays a price.<\/p>\n

    It’s also worth distinguishing between …<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. the immediate empirical truth of statements (e.g., “Lester Holt is a Democrat,” which is false), and<\/li>\n
    2. the truth or validity of broad ideological positions (e.g., “The media is biased against regular folks”).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I believe that Hillary Clinton’s center\/left ideology is much more defensible than Trump’s authoritarian ethno-nationalism, but that requires arguments rather than empirical data; and other positions are\u00a0more defensible still than Clinton’s.<\/p>\n

      I am also inclined to think that Trump is pretty candid about his own\u00a0ideological position, although he fails to acknowledge its implications (which is a fault of his truth-seeking). I am not sure how candid Clinton is about her ideology; that is hard to assess from afar. I’d argue\u00a0that center-left American politicians exhibit\u00a0a general<\/em>\u00a0lack of\u00a0ideological candor because they presume\u00a0that many beneficial policies are unpopular. For instance, it would be wise to borrow and spend on infrastructure, but you can’t say that\u00a0because the American people don’t trust government. It would be\u00a0desirable\u00a0to standardize curricula and tests because in lots of communities, parents\u00a0are creationists or\u00a0otherwise misguided, but you’d better not say that because those people vote. I’d posit that Clinton struggles to attract trust in part because she belongs to\u00a0a whole\u00a0ideological bloc that\u00a0has struggled since the 1970s to present itself candidly to the electorate.<\/p>\n

      See also:\u00a0Bernard Williams on truth as a virtue of the humanities<\/a>;\u00a0why Hillary Clinton appears untrustworthy<\/a>; and\u00a0Hillary Clinton on spending for infrastructure<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      It flabbergasts many people to learn\u00a0that more Americans view\u00a0Trump rather than Clinton as “honest and trustworthy” (35% versus 33%),\u00a0even though we can read in The New York Times,\u00a0“A Week of Whoppers from Donald Trump”; in The Washington Post,\u00a0“Trump\u2019s Week Reveals Bleak View, Dubious Statements in ‘Alternative Universe‘”; and in\u00a0The\u00a0Los Angeles Times,\u00a0“Scope of Trump’s Falsehoods Unprecedented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-trump","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17426"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17446,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17426\/revisions\/17446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}