Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress on Thursday was a master class at demonstrating how elected Republicans have become what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck termed People of the Lie, in his 1986 bestseller. It was the perfect example for this week being the 16th anniversary of the corrupt Citizens United decision.
For most of American history, lying in politics carried a real and immediate cost. Get caught and you’d lose credibility, maybe get voted out of office, and sometimes — as with the roughly 40 people around Richard Nixon who went to prison — even face criminal consequences.
That informal but effective enforcement mechanism depended on a shared understanding that truth mattered and that the law applied equally to everyone. Five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, shattered that understanding when they handed down Citizens United.
By redefining political bribery as “free speech,” Justices Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Scalia turned money into power without accountability and, in the process, turned lying into a currency that could be minted, traded, and hoarded by unscrupulous Republican politicians.
Once political power could be bought openly, the incentive structure in American politics changed. The goal of today’s GOP’s is no longer persuasion grounded in reality; instead, it’s morphed into a sophisticated system of lies and half-truths.
With social media amplification and backed up by a billionaire-owned rightwing media machine larger than any the world’s ever seen, the bigger the lie, the more emotionally gripping it is, and the faster and farther it’d travel, the more useful it became to Republicans. Lying stopped being a moral failing and became the foundation of their business and political model.
When a Republican politician can raise money, mobilize voters, intimidate opponents, or justify cruelty with a falsehood, that lie pays for itself with huge political, power, and even economic dividends. Truth, by contrast, became a liability as we saw Republican after Republican try to discredit or shut up Jack Smith, in the service of the Party’s 2020 “election fraud” lie.
The GOP has become so addicted to lies that its members can’t even say out loud the actual name of the Democratic Party, instead falling back on Joe McCarthy’s advice that “‘democratic’ sounds too nice” and instead Republicans should always “call it the Democrat Party, with an emphasis on the ‘rat’!” If you don’t know what I mean, just listen to the Republicans who appear on the Sunday political shows. And, sadly, Democrats and news people don’t even bother to call them out any more.
That’s the context in which the testimony by Smith must be understood. What we watched wasn’t just a partisan disagreement; it was an embarrassingly public demonstration of how deeply-monetized lying has woven itself into the Republican Party’s operating system, even before a pathological liar became the party’s standard-bearer.
Smith calmly laid out the facts and legal standards, and Republican members responded by repeating b------- narratives that have already been disproven in scores of courtrooms, in sworn testimony, and on the public record.
Those moments illustrate the multiple layers of the lies Republicans have been selling us for four decades, as well as the new ones Trump is trying to get away with. They’re lying to the public about what the law allows, lying about what the evidence shows, lying about how investigations work, lying to delegitimize any person or institution that threatens their power, and lying to base voters who’ve been trained to accept the lies as gospel.
Each of those lies has value; each can be cashed in for attention, money, or even political or legal protection.
This poisoning of the GOP and its base didn’t start with Trump or on January 6.
Every one of those lies followed the same pattern: ignore the data, attack the messengers, repeat the talking point, and cash the check.
Citizens United — which came into being when Clarence Thomas, himself on the take from a rightwing Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with business before the Court, became the deciding vote — supercharged that cycle. As a result, billionaires can now pour unlimited money into politics, teaching Republican politicians which stories are rewarded and which are punished.
With corruption having become the underlying foundation of the GOP, lying became not just acceptable but necessary. Telling the truth about inequality, climate change, immigration, corporate power, Trump’s crimes, the state of our health care system, or even democracy itself threatens the party’s revenue stream.
What made yesterday’s hearing so particularly revealing is that it showed how normalized lying has become for GOP politicians.
The Republican inquisitors evinced no embarrassment, no hesitation, and didn’t even attempt to reconcile their own claims with any of the known facts. The lies were delivered as ritual, as tribal identity markers, as proof of belonging. As we saw in Germany in the 1930s and the USSR in the mid-20th century, this is what happens when a political party internalizes lying as a political strategy.
M. Scott Peck warned decades ago that social systems built on lies eventually lose the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, loyalty from morality, or raw power from truth. We’re watching his 1986 warning play out in real time.
From the Reagan Revolution and his massive tax cuts to George W. Bush sending our young men and women off to Iraq and Afghanistan to Donald Trump pushing his claim he won 2020, when lying is rewarded by billionaire donors, complicit media, and with gullible voters, it doesn’t stay confined to campaign ads. It metastasizes through institutions, corrodes accountability, and turns governance into mere theater.
Citizens United didn’t just corrupt elections: it corrupted truth itself. And until we reverse it, until we restore the idea that democracy isn’t for sale and reality isn’t optional, lying will remain the most profitable commodity in Republican politics.
And our country will be forced to continue paying the price.