A snowflake fell, and then another, and another. But they were not liberals, and it was not 2024. It was November 2004 in Kyiv, Ukraine. For its first decade of independence, Ukraine had been ruled by Soviet apparatchiks, but the attendant burgeoning corruption had forced its leader to step aside, and his handpicked successor, one Viktor Yanukovych (yes, that Yanukovych) was facing serious, determined opposition. Ukraine was as important to Vladimir Putin then as it is now, and so he launched a pilot of what has now become a highly sophisticated program of interference in other countries’ elections.

Like an emergent virus trying to develop a successful parasitic relationship with its host, this first sally was clumsy at best. The campaign created a frisson of interest in the US when his foot soldiers deployed traditional Russian statecraft and poisoned the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. However, not only did Yushchenko survive, but the attack left his face permanently and grotesquely scarred, a highly effective 24/7/365 spot for change.

On Election Day, the Ukrainians deployed exit pollers, and those pollers found serious discrepancies between the exits and the official results. As a result, they, the people, refused to accept the outcome. Instead, hundreds of thousands descended on the capital, non-violently, and declared, in the face of bitter sub-zero temperatures, that they would not leave until the election was rerun. Women from all over the country, including the “rebellious” east, daily cooked vats of food and brought them, along with coats, blankets, and toiletries, to the city, often trudging through deep snow drifts to do so.

The Ukrainians got their rerun election, and with international observers monitoring every move, Yushchenko was declared the clear winner. But Yushchenko had a falling out with his chief ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, who became the standard bearer for their party. Yanukovych, the 2004 loser, hired a guy named Paul Manafort, who came highly recommended by the GOP, along with his wingman, Rick Gates. They hatched a plan worthy of their pedigree, manufacturing evidence of fraud against Tymoshenko, which Yanukovych used not only to win the next presidential election, but also to — you guessed it — lock her up! lock her up! lock her up!

But when Yanukovych broke the fundamental promise he made to win the election, a commitment to seek membership in the European Union, and instead was on the verge of signing a binding agreement to steer the country decisively towards his Russian masters — and against the West, the Ukrainian people, slightly less peacefully,¹ rose up once more.

To Putin and his stealthily growing fanbase in America, the Ukrainians were now (a-ha!) anti-democratic fascists because they were trying to “overthrow” a “legitimately elected democratic government.” To the Ukrainians, when someone voted into office not only breaks a fundamental promise they made, but does the opposite of what they said they would (or disavows something for the entire campaign, then makes it, against the expectations of his own supporters, his № 1 priority), for no reason that could be smudged into an “evolutionarily” legitimate volte-face,² he was no longer legitimately elected, he was elected under false pretenses, and therefore by fraud. Yanukovych was forced to flee the country, an outcome that every democracy in the world, including our own, recognized as legitimate.

The Ukrainians are often seen as the spiritual descendants of our own Founders. While no one on our staff is Ukrainian, several of us lived in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago for nearly a decade, including during the 2004 Orange Revolution, which we participated in (to the extent we were invited to), and what we will always remember about it — and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity against Yanukovych — is that both occurred in the dead of winter, under the conditions that would most test — and prove — the resolve of the people.

The first occurred in the aftermath of an election run in November,³ but the timing of the second suggests the choice of season was probably not a coincidence.⁴ What we remember, in particular, are thousands and thousands of Ukrainians, standing quietly or chanting, under cold, clear starry winter nights, night after night after night, and we are reminded of the birth of our own nation, that first winter when George Washington gathered his dispirited troops at Valley Forge to regroup, after many a dark night of the soul, steeling themselves to take the fight to the most powerful military in the world, amid the promise of spring.

Democracy, like truth, can be slow in its spread, despite the ample proof of its overwhelming superiority, as measured by core metrics of a nation’s well-being), and strong correlations within our country as well⁵ — across a raft of measures — when just a single element of the democratic process, the ease with which citizens can vote, varies from state to state.⁶

In 1776, there was only one would-be democracy — we’re not sure there was even a “hybrid regime” to be found then.⁷ Everywhere else authoritarianism and totalitarianism ruled. Yet today, even by the Democracy Index’s stringent standards, there are seventy two democracies around the world, twenty four of them pure, governing nearly half of the world’s population, and another thirty-six hybrid regimes, countries whose leaders at least recognize the need to deliver on the promise of democracy in some real form and to some real degree. Even most authoritarian regimes believe themselves compelled to conduct sham elections from time to time to ensure their ongoing legitimacy.

Thus it’s both notable and expected that a decade after the Ukrainian people threw Yanukovych out of office for lying to get elected, another relatively small democracy, Wales, announced it would be the first nation to formally punish politicians, up to and including recall, for lying in their campaigns, sending shock waves — mainly of delight — across the democratic world, especially in the free press. In our neighbor to the north, which has had a front row seat for our new national pastime (elections as sport), the Toronto Star praised the Welsh for “putting the great back in Great Britain,” while The National Observer, in an article titled “We Need A Law Against Lying In Politics,” posed the following trenchant question:

Ask yourself what’s more outlandish: [Wales’] idea, or the extent to which we already tolerate lying in our political discourse?

This from a nation whose own national sport is hockey.

In Wales’ neighbor to the west, England, which, in the wake of Brexit, has seen the steep toll politicians’ lies can take (not to mention those of hostile foreign powers), a recent poll found an overwhelming majority of Britons consider “lack of honesty” the aspect of British political culture they most want to see changed. The country has already put a law on the books that can annul an election if a person or entity other than the candidate or his/her campaign promulgates lies that result in his/her election, and groups like Compassion In Politics, led by award-winning journalist Jennifer Nadel, are pushing for more, arguing that:

At this point in history, lying can no longer be dismissed as an unpleasant by-product of the political game.

Small potatoes? Sure — we’d even agree to downgrade them to tater tots. But that’s what Yankee Doodle Dandy once looked like to authoritarians around the world, way back in the day, and the world has heated and sped up a lot since then. Plus, when dealing with the morally bankrupt, we think we’d do well to remember Hemingway’s description of how the final reckoning comes to pass.

Big Lie-powered catastrophes like Brexit have been just one of the drivers of anti-prevaricatory reform. Another has been near-death brushes with autocracy in general. Since the Polish Civic Coalition’s remarkable victory over the authoritarian Law and Justice Party, in an election that was neither free nor fair, the Poles have begun adding ‘never again’ guardrails to their electoral system,⁸ including changes intended to tamp down lying, every authoritarian’s initial/original power source,⁹ fast-tracking election-related libel suits in its courts, for example, to ensure their resolution one way or the other before voting begins.

Of course, one key reason the Poles and many other peoples’ have been able to emerge on the other side of democratic eclipse (not to mention many a catastrophe of other kinds) has been democracy’s beacon (and arsenal) beaming (and waiting, vigilantly) on the other side of the ocean. Those who would claim we just have to live with what even staunch First Amendment advocates in the journalism community call a direct, existential threat to democracy, need to answer this question:

When we’re in the Big Lie-powered authoritarian barrel, dealing with its associated catastrophes of malice and incompetence, who’s going to backstop and rescue us?

And then¹⁰ we should answer the next question ourselves: do we really have to live with the level of dishonesty rampant in our political system today?

Short answer? No. We do not, and not just because other democracies are leading the way and starting to prove it. Criminalizing — and punishing (in a political way,¹¹ at minimum) — lying in politics just makes uncommon sense. In fact, it could easily be argued that it’s already illegal — or should be — under existing criminal law.

The focus of “intent” in the legal definition of false advertising, for example, is on whether the false statement was intended to promote the sale of a product — in this case the candidate — not on the intent to tell the truth or not, provided the statement was made “knowingly or recklessly” with the intent to sell. Many companies, in fact, have been convicted of false advertising in which it was never proven that their claims were outright lies, only that the company hadn’t proven them to be accurate, which is exactly what we’re talking about here: a claim, a promise, that turned out not to be true. In consequence, manufacturers often put labels on their products that seem written for other species, or for those too young to read (which rather defeats their practical purpose, if not their legal one)

Of course, there will always be interslopers ready to make pleadings for politics as a special case. So let’s go ground-floor political on their *****, both de jure and de facto:

• De jure: Lying is clearly a form of voter suppression — the real voter fraud — and therefore thoroughly unconstitutional under the 14th amendment, the only place in our founding document whose authors not only go to great pains to close loopholes in the strongest and broadest possible language, but even specify penalties for violations — and Old Testament-style ones at that.
• De facto: As we’ve seen up close and personal, a politician who achieves office by deceit — let alone twice — is capable of doing far more damage to our country than any FDA-approved drug or barrister, so why shouldn’t politicos be held to at least the same standards of honesty that pharmaceutical companies, attorneys, and many others are required by law to adhere to, particularly when there are far more than enough differences between the two parties to provide ample grounds for the electorate to make a decision — either way — without resort to duplicity?

Of course, in pointing these things out, we have only covered the bases, laid the foundation; there are (of course) plenty of “higher order” objections that will inevitably be lodged by those with a vested interest in keeping truth well-hidden (or an equally strong interest in contrarianism), but we’ve consistently found these sallies surprisingly easy to swat away (even commit rejoinders to memory for parties) — not even rising to the level of gnats. For example:

• There are grey areas. Name a law where there aren’t. And welcome to our comment section. Prepare to be disappointed.
• There’s no way to know if the politico knew he/she was lying? Irrelevant — it should be the politician’s job/obligation to know whether what they’re saying is true or not.
• There’s no way to know what’s true? In that case, we should just give up the whole enterprise, and return to Hobbes’ state of nature, because without truth, there’s only power. Fortunately, the absence of truth is the biggest lie of all.
• It violates politicians’ First Amendment rights. And yet it has been established for more than a century,¹² originally by one of our greatest jurists, no less, that there’s no First Amendment right to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater. Yet politicians should be exempt from this because they do it in thousands of theaters at a time, not just one? Really?
• It will unbalance the branches of government. If done correctly, indeed it will, but not in the way those who make this argument think. They assume it will put the fate of elected politicians in the hands of unelected judges, but we have something far worse in mind (from the perspective of the politicos, at least): juries of we, the people¹³ — still their peers (here on earth) — which would be much more aligned with the approach the folks we all credit with inventing democracy, the Ancient Greeks, had in mind when they came up with The Idea¹⁴ — as well as completely in line with who our Founders believed should have the final word,¹⁵ in an era when a much more perfect union between what they envisioned and reality is possible than in 1789. The distance between anywhere in America and the capital can be measured in milliseconds; it’s time for all of us to be more directly involved in the process of governing.

There are no doubt other objections that can be lodged (seriously, we’d be grateful if you lodged yours); there always are. But no matter the quantity, we doubt that even collectively they can outweigh the elephant in the room sitting on the opposite end of the scales: the capacity, well-proven all over the world, for political dishonesty to do substantial irreparable damage to both democracy and society in general.

And there’s something else to consider, at least as important, that’s much more rarely discussed: the potential effect of having that pachyderm’s weight lifted off where it always ultimately settles, on our shoulders. As the old African proverb says: “When elephants fight, only the grass suffers.” Imagine how different our democracy would be, how different we might feel about it, about our fellow citizens, our country, if we knew politicians were always telling us the truth, or even if they merely had the same norms of honesty (and our media had the same expectations) that pertain and persist in Denmark, for example, regularly ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world.

The first thing to weaken and fall away would be the hatreds, and thence the divisions. Why? Because a savvy politician doesn’t tell their audience lies about themselves — they tell them about the other: immigrants, people of color, the bureaucratic deep state,¹⁶ other states, other parties, other ideologies, other countries — lies people and things their audience won’t necessarily know are false.

This is why, incredibly, the 2024 electorate thought Republicans — especially Trump — were more honest than Democrats. Because throughout the Biden years, Democrats kept telling them things that didn’t jibe with their personal experience, like “the economy’s great — look at all the metrics” — and Republicans didn’t.¹⁷

More to the point, a great deal of research has been done in recent years about “polarization” in America, and virtually all of it points in the same direction: it’s unnatural — as you would expect in the melting pot of the world — and has largely been manufactured by politicians, the political class, and partisan media outlets. Minor scrapes and scratches in the body politic have become exploited into gaping wounds by infectious elements — for their own benefit only — wounds that grow angrier and more grievous every day as the real vermin — or the closest we have to it — continue to feed. When lies by politicians about other Americans cease, healing will follow.

The second, third, and fourth things to fall, which may be even more important — will be cynicism, pessimism, and fatalism. Which matters not only for our country, but the world, perhaps even our species and life itself on this planet. “American exceptionalism” has become a reviled concept in recent years, but there’s one quality Americans uniquely share that anyone who regularly interacts the denizens of other nations knows even our worst enemies believe has been exceptional about us for a long, long time: our optimism.

American optimism is what keeps us looking forward in hope while the rest of the world, like Lot’s wife, turns to look back in fear and wallow nostalgically in a past that, for better or worse, can never be again. Without an America peering over the horizon, the human race is likely to get run over by a future traveling at a high-speed rail rate of change. Those who think others can become “the one indispensable nation” if we stand down and stand back are forgetting that it is competition with us that’s driven every plausible successor as far out of their cultural comfort zones as they are today.¹⁸ American optimism has enabled our country to hold itself to the highest standards, never comparing itself to anything but the best, often only against an ideal version of itself, demanding that the elites of other nations do the same,¹⁹ never making or accepting excuses (yes, kids, that’s how we used to be), executing our visions with a pragmatism that may be even more deeply optimistic.

Getting rid of lies won’t completely solve the problems now increasingly causing sticker shock and buyer’s remorse among many of those who voted for the winning candidate in last fall’s election (we’ll explain why in part 2 of this series, and what can be done about it — let us know if you’d like to be alerted when it’s published). But none of the problems we face will be solvable until we realize we’re in a second Cold War with our enemies, the one Khrushchev promised his country would win “without taking a shot…” by destroying us “from within.”

Their weapon of choice is the one that’s been most successful in subjugating their own people as they’ve honed it to perfection: artillery barrages of lies, lies, lies, or as Trump advisor and Russophile²⁰ Steve Bannon more colorfully puts it, “flooding the zone with s***.” Their goal is to use it to bring us down to their level, to the level of cynicism, fear, and apathy they’ve created in their own nations. We cannot allow this. While we still can, we must take up the mandate of all the great faiths of the Western world, of generations of America before us and, as the first — arguably still the only — nation born of protest, in the crucible of dissent, “step into the breach.” We must make lying wrong again.