My column this week is posted here, on the Hallowed Secularism blog. Unfortunately, I won’t be serving as a columnist for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star in the future. Happy reading while I look for a new platform–suggestions welcome.

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Many attorneys have had the experience of testifying under oath as to whether they had been ineffective in some way during a previous criminal trial.

Testimony along this line generally arises when a prior client alleges such ineffectiveness in  an attempt to get a conviction thrown out.

Attorneys in this situation face a crisis. On the one hand, they wish to protect the interests of their former clients. On the other hand, there is the obligation to tell the truth under oath.

But for attorneys who represented clients in capital cases, and whose clients received the death penalty, there is usually no crisis at all. For many of those attorneys, and I count myself among them, opposition to the death penalty outweighs the obligation to tell the truth.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, but may have to do with the deterioration of objective standards and morality in this culture, this attitude that the end justifies the means, seems to be growing.

The attitude was on full display among supporters of the attempt to amend the Ohio constitution to require a 60% vote rather than a simple majority for a public initiative amending the constitution to pass.

Supporters of this change, such as Ohio Republican Sen.J.D. Vance, insisted that its purpose was to keep outside interest money from dominating Ohio politics.

But this was simply untrue, as was abundantly clear from the fact that outside money largely bankrolled the effort itself.

The real reason for this attempt to change the rules was to keep an expected majority of Ohio voters from amending the state constitution in November to enshrine a right to abortion in the state constitution.

Abortion opponents did not wish to admit that most Ohio voters support some kind of right to abortion. Rather than seek to convince their fellow Ohio voters to oppose abortion, they attempted to manipulate the process, not only by changing the rules but by putting this change on the ballot in a special election in August, when they hoped for a very low voter turnout.

As widely reported in the media, this dishonest approach turned off Ohio voters and contributed to the failure of the effort.

This is not the first time that the anti-abortion movement has resorted to dishonest tactics. When Roe v. Wade was the law, and abortion rights were protected, anti-abortion state legislatures would routinely write unnecessary regulations, such as requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, when such regulations were never applied to other medical procedures of similar complexity.

The purpose of such regulations was plainly to close abortion clinics but those same state legislatures claimed instead that their purpose was to protect maternal health.

Death penalty lawyers and abortion opponents are by no means alone in their willingness to lie for the greater good. For years, environmentalists justifiably concerned about climate change, have attributed every dramatic weather event to climate change. And they have hesitated to acknowledge that climate change might have any beneficial consequences.

For example, while higher ocean temperatures undoubtedly make tropical storms and hurricanes stronger, increased dust from northern Africa caused by climate change may actually retard the number of tropical storms that form in the Atlantic.

Nor do environmentalists like to admit that, although an important background factor, climate change is not the only reason that temperatures are currently so high worldwide. An ongoing El Niño phenomenon, and the explosion of an underwater volcano, would have rendered 2023 a warm year even in the absence of climate change.

Of course, on the other side, there is the incredible and willful misinformation about climate change that has been peddled by oil companies, Republican politicians and right wing media in an effort to mislead the public.

One saw the same willingness to suppress the truth in the manic effort during the height of the pandemic to stamp out any hint that COVID-19 might have had a human origin rather than a natural one. This occurred even though no one knew, and no one knows today, exactly how the virus arose.

In all of these cases, and the many, many more examples I could give, there is the fear by insiders and activists that the public will not make intelligent judgments about important public issues. Many Americans no longer believe that truth can be counted upon to win the day in political debates.

For this reason, it is not felt to be sufficient that one simply puts the facts on the table and trust the people to come to the right decision.

It never occurs to us that if this critique of public opinion is correct, then democracy is not only impossible, it is not even desirable.

Nor does it occur to us that if we cannot convince the public of our positions, maybe the public is right in some sense and we should rethink our proposals.

Hard as it is to admit, the older approaches to politics make more sense than our current skepticism. We have to assume, at least as a starting point, that our political opponents have something important to contribute and are as motivated as we are by a sincere desire to make the world a better place.

We also have to assume that the public is wiser than we are. And that given the facts and reasonable arguments about those facts, the people will come to the right decisions.

If it turns out that this approach is outdated and naive, then our experiment in self-government is outdated and naive. I don’t believe that is the case.

Lots of people talk about the threat to democracy that their opponents represent. Democracy is said to be in peril.

It turns out, however, that the real threat to democracy in America is the discouraged faith on both the left and the right that we are no longer capable of democracy. If that is the case, then democracy is not only threatened, it is already over.