Cynthia Tucker: Lies and rhetoric are their greatest weapons | Column

As a journalist who has spent her career in a profession dedicated to giving citizens a transparent accounting of government actions, I am unnerved by the deliberate disavowal of facts. As an American who believes that facts are essential to a healthy democracy, I am depressed by the ease with which lies capture the allegiance of so many of my fellow citizens.

This is certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Educated men, they believed that their fledgling democracy depended on an educated citizenry. Let’s face it: They were also racist and elitist, and they constructed a system that gave power only to white men like themselves. But their Enlightenment ideals led to a nation with a widespread system of free and compulsory public education, giving every citizen the opportunity to learn to read, to write, to reason.

The Founders also bequeathed to us a First Amendment that gives the government little power to control what people say or write — a freedom for which I am deeply grateful. But neither the educational ideals nor the free-speech liberties are working out as the Founders might have hoped. Education has failed to produce rational thinking. Free speech has led to a vast network of disinformation.

As historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, there has always been a “paranoid style” in American politics. That style was in evidence in the 1950s, when U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., smeared members of Harry Truman’s administration with false accusations of communist subversion, claiming to have a long list of communist spies serving in the State Department. But his fellow senators eventually rose up against McCarthy. Fellow Republicans led a successful move to censure him.