A guiding principle that everyone should adopt when deciding who to vote for in Tuesday’s midterm elections (and every other election, for that matter)?
Don’t vote for anyone who you know beforehand would refuse to accept that they lost.
If you know beforehand that a given candidate would never admit defeat, perhaps instead insisting that the election was stolen, then you know that candidate is not genuinely concerned with the truth. If someone is committed to saying “I won the election” regardless of whether or not such a claim is true, then their saying “I won the election” doesn’t have any credibility. Regardless of the actual result, we have no reason to think such a person is tracking the truth.
After all, they were going to claim victory regardless!
Society should harbor a healthy skepticism when it comes to taking blind ideologues and partisan apologists at face value. One can generally predict what they’re going to say before they say it (regardless of whether or not it’s true). Moreover, even if such a candidate does win, one cannot trust their stated principles will align with their actions in office. If someone is willing to be untruthful during a campaign, we shouldn’t expect them to change that behavior once they have secured the desired position. If anything, elected officials face even more pressure for political expediency and self-preservation.
Regardless of political affiliation and regardless of how good their other policies might be, the long-term health of our democratic republic must necessarily be concerned with the truth. Maintaining blatant falsehoods when it comes to election results must be a universal, unforgivable sin for every candidate of all political parties and persuasions.
When political candidates are not genuinely concerned with truth concerning election results, they become threats to democracy. This is why authoritarian regimes love such candidates; they help make it far easier for such nefarious regimes to cast aspersions on free nations everywhere. If we know beforehand that a candidate would never admit defeat, then they’re refusing to accept the basic principles that underwrite democracy.
I am a philosophy professor at Hillsdale College, and one of our mottos is “pursuing truth and defending liberty.” It’s no accident that those two goals are expressed side by side. Whenever we stop pursuing truth — and pursue demagoguery, ideology captured by cults of personality, or political expediency instead — we open the doors to tyranny. If we’re to preserve our cherished liberties, we must insist upon upholding truth and supporting candidates who will do the same.
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Ian Church is an associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College and the director of the Arete Research Center for Philosophy, Science, and Society.
