It's true that conservatives seem to play politics like chess while liberals play checkers: they have all sorts of Machiavellian strategies in play, some of whose groundwork is so complex and far-reaching that the foundations were laid decades ago. For example, look at Liberty University: an entire university created for the purpose of graduating ideologically pure conservative professionals to infiltrate key sectors of society such as the judicial system.
But while this is a definite strength for conservatives (their legal strategy has resulted in the near-total domination of the Supreme Court), it is also a weakness in some ways. Lying comes to conservative politicians as easily as breathing, and why wouldn't it? For a self-styled Machiavellian strategist, words and promises are not honest expressions of the self, nor are they a sacred bond: instead, they are merely tools, to be strategically deployed or discarded as necessary to achieve one's goals.
Machiavelli himself wrote in "The Prince" that "princes who do great things pay little account to their promises", so if you fancy yourself a Machiavellian genius, your promises clearly mean very little. Sun Tzu wrote that "all warfare is deception", so when conservative political operators treat politics as a kind of warfare rather than a sportsmanlike competition, honesty goes out the window. Lies become a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Hence, we have hundreds of fake right-wing "patriot" social media accounts which are actually run out of paid "troll farms" overseas, etc. We have a president who is so accustomed to lying that he lies constantly about his own well-documented public actions and statements, and then tries to blackmail the media to go along with it. His policies themselves can be based on lies: one of his strategies to deal with rising Covid infection numbers in 2020 was to encourage public health agencies to lie to the public, and downplay the numbers by simply not testing people anymore. And these tactics can be disturbingly effective: for example, most Republican voters today blame Biden for the 2020 pandemic response, even though Biden did not take office until January 2021.
But habitual lying does have a cost. People eventually learn what a snake you are, and snakes attract other snakes. An organization rife with liars will be filled with traitors, back-stabbers, schemers, and grifters. You cannot trust anyone: your closest advisors may be plotting against you. Any person of integrity will have abandoned your cause a long time ago. You can't get good information, because your entire organization is made up of people who think lies are just a useful and necessary tool for smart strategists. Eventually, you may find yourself so buried in your own mountain of lies that you suffocate.
www.theguardian.com
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