Sometimes, the truth isn’t good enough.

Thus says Batman to Jim Gordon in the concluding scene of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.   

Americans disagree.  To know anything at all about our public policies and discourse is to know that Americans hold that the truth is never good enough. 

Plato long ago referred to “convenient fictions,” untruths that every society needs in order to preserve itself.  Surely, however tempted we are to think otherwise, there is no society in the annals of history that is as dependent upon convenient fictions as is contemporaryAmerica.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that our political-cultural existence is nothing more than a house of such fictions.

Take fiction #1, what the early 20^th century political theorist Joseph Schumpeter once called the “classical doctrine of democracy.”  Americans still speak as if they believed that there is something privileged, even sacred, about democracy, for it is only within a democracy that human beings are free to choose their elected representatives. 

Or so goes the fiction.

As Schumpeter and others long ago noted, there is all of the difference in the world between the democratic ideal and the actual practices of voters under a democratically constituted government.  In reality, voters don’t choose their representatives as much as their representatives choose them.  What we call “the will of the people” is not “the motive power” but “the product” of “the political process,” Schumpeter informs us. 

The average voter’s will, far from being “determinate” and “rational,” is actually “an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions” thrust upon him by “pressure groups and propaganda[.]”  For the average voter, “mere assertion, often repeated” is much weightier than “rational argument” could ever hope to be.

Gaetano Mosca wrote that voters don’t choose their representatives but, rather, “the representative has himself elected by the voters [.]”  More exactly, “his friends have him elected.”  However unbelievable we may find this, the truth is that life under so-called representative government or democracy is no different than life under any other form of government in that it is always an “organized minority” that runs the show by imposing “its will on the disorganized majority.”

If the truth was good enough, we would have to admit that the voter exists to be manipulated by politicians and their supporters in media.

Another fiction, never more loudly proclaimed than during a presidential election season, is that there are dramatic differences between our two national political parties.

The truth is that is that there are far more similarities between Republicans and Democrats than there are differences.  Take any issue, domestic or foreign: if there are any differences at all between their positions, they are difference in detail, not in kind.  Republicans are every bit as much in favor of a large, centralized national government as are Democrats. 

At the very least, the vision of government held byAmerica’s founders and embodied in the Constitution is eons removed from the government that both Republicans and Democrats are fighting to maintain today.  Jefferson and Madison would look aghast at George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike.

If the truth was good enough, we would admit that life under one party is not bound to be all that different from life under the other.

A third fiction is that America remains the freest country that has ever existed.  In reality, America ceased to be a free country probably as early on as 1865.  The liberty for which our founding fathers wagered their lives was not some abstract idea.  It was inseparable from the federalized government guaranteed by and delineated in the Constitution.

More directly, American liberty, as our founders understood it, consisted in a wide dispersion of authority and power.  And it consisted in a national government that, with respect to most matters, was required to defer to the individual states that produced it.

Beginning with the Union’s victory over the Confederacy, this vision of liberty began its retreat toward the dustbin of history.  Today, it is as much a relic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as are the musket ball and the horse-and-buggy carriage.

That life is more pleasant in America than in most of the world is neither here nor there. As students of the institution of slavery have long noted, some slaves lived far more pleasantly than others—and far more pleasantly than many freeborn men.  Those slaves who were closest to the Sultan all but ruled the Ottoman Empire, and even in the antebellum South, there were slaves whose masters allowed them to establish their own businesses (as blacksmiths, say) and residences miles away from the plantation.

But however pleasant their lives may have been, slaves were still slaves because, even if only legally, they were subject, not to law, but to the wills of their masters.

If the truth was good enough, we would admit that the size and scope of our national government has long ago divested us of our liberty.

Sadly, for Americans, the truth is never good enough.