In 2010, my book The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics appeared with a cover reproducing Grant Wood’s well known painting ‘Parson Weem’s Fable’.¹ It depicts Mason L. ‘Parson’ Weems, the author of a hagiographical biography of George Washington pulling back a theater curtain and pointing to the scene of the six-year old future ‘father of his country’ confessing to his own father that he had cut down a cherry tree. The latter’s forgiving encomium to his son for telling the truth became one of the most celebrated anecdotes in the folklore of American political culture when it was included in the wildly popular McGuffy’s Readers for children in the 1830s.

But as Wood’s portrayal of it as staged by Weems slyly implies, it was really a fabrication, brazenly plagiarized from the British author James Beattie. To bring home his point about the dubious origins of the legends surrounding Washington, Wood placed two small figures in the background harvesting the fruit of another tree. If you look closely, it is clear they are black slaves owned by his family on their Virginia plantation, ten of whom Washington inherited when his father died. He later acquired hundreds more and remained a slaveholder for fifty-six years, delaying the emancipation of his human chattel until after his own death. The popular ignorance of these inconvenient facts and others like them has led recent historical revisionists to question 1776 as the emblematic date for the founding of the United States and suggest instead 1619, when the first Africans were brought to America from the Portuguese colony of Luanda in present-day Angola.

When my book was translated into Russian a few years later, the publishers realized that the legend of Washington and the cherry tree, let alone Wood’s deflating depiction of it, would mean nothing to its audience, and so adorned the cover with a very different image. They chose a photograph of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin sitting together at the Yalta conference in 1945, cordially smiling to convey an air of harmonious agreement. ‘The Big Three’ were there to formulate plans for a liberated Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The declaration that followed the meeting promised the people of Europe that it would ‘create democratic institutions of their own choice’ through free elections. As soon became clear after the war, Stalin had his fingers crossed when that promise was made. Other ticklish issues, such as the fate of the British Empire, were also left tactfully unresolved. When the Cold War began shortly thereafter, the smiles faded with the realization that the show of unity at Yalta had been a façade masking the abiding conflict of interests and ideologies dividing the powers.

What the change of covers reveals is the complexity of the intimate relationship between politics and mendacity, routinely denounced but taking many forms for different purposes and with various possible justifications. In the case of Parson Weems’s concocted anecdote, it served symbolically to distinguish America from its hypocritical and secretive British progenitor as a new country where truthfulness is honored. Our most eminent founding father, it implied, was a man of integrity and transparency, who set a standard for virtuous political leadership in a fledgling democracy. How slavery was squared with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was not candidly addressed.² As a fable, it is typical of many of the dubious origin stories that have served to legitimate the creation of a polity whose actual birth may have been less innocently conceived. We might call it an example of the role that myth and legend play in the realm of political legitimation in general, where claims of sovereignty over territory as well as representation of that always slippery subject called ‘the people’ often depend on dubious narratives that serious historical investigation might easily debunk.

The Russian cover tells a different story. Here the duplicity is the one typical of political alliances, domestic as well as international, which are inherently fragile, often formed to fight a common enemy and only lasting as long as the fight goes on. Think, for example, of politicians who vehemently denounce each other during an early stage of an electoral campaign, say a primary in American politics or before the formation of a coalition of parties in a European parliament. When a candidate is chosen, the denunciations are quickly forgotten, and the losers grit their teeth and praise the winner to the skies. At some point in the process, perhaps at all points, someone is dissembling. For a risible current example, follow South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham’s roller-coaster attitude, at turns contemptuous and sycophantic, towards Donald Trump.³

Much more can be said about the varying roles that spin, obfuscation, embellishment and outright mendacity have played and continue to play in politics. However, in the space I have, I can only offer a few salient observations. What must first be acknowledged is that without at least some faith in the truthfulness and integrity of its participants, politics, like virtually all other forms of human interaction, cannot function. Hypocrisy, as Rochefoucauld told us long ago, is ‘the tribute vice pays to virtue’. In all contexts, lying cannot have its intended effect to deceive without the default position being truth-telling. Credence in a lie relies, at least in great part, on the credibility of the assertion and trust, however misplaced, in the honesty of its assertor.

And yet, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, ‘no one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.’⁴ Politics, after all, is an adversarial as well as collaborative enterprise, where the stakes often seem high enough to justify virtually any means to achieve victory. Rather than inherently immoral, it is a space in which competing moralities as well as interests often clash – think of the debate over abortion rights – leaving room for a disconnect between high-minded values and the ruthless tactics used to realize them. The real currency of politics, moreover, is volatile opinion, which can be fickle, ambivalent and inchoate, rather than hard, irrefutable fact. Politics also draws on competing narratives that resist commensuration, formed as they are by competing historical memories, and projecting potential endpoints in a future not yet realized. Even when its struggle for power does not involve violence or the threat thereof, politics draws on the seductive influence of rhetoric and images as much as on the compelling weight of the better argument in rational deliberation.

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