Among all a politician’s great crimes, perhaps the least forgivable is allowing the public’s understanding of a situation to lose all connection with what he or she knows to be the reality. The only thing that is worse is if that politician’s rhetoric has helped to create the gulf.
The last Labour government delivered two horrors of the genre: Tony Blair’s justification of the war on Iraq; and Gordon Brown’s boast that economic boom and bust was a thing of the past. Both are still paying a heavy reputational price.
The current government has not entirely learnt from Blair and Brown’s failures. Instead of committing simultaneously to control immigration and liberate north Africa, David Cameron must now wish he’d explained to the public that the latter objective might somewhat complicate the former.
George Osborne, meanwhile, is one of many finance ministers around the world preparing to explain that the prolonged era of cheap money, low inflation and booming emerging markets may not have been the one-way ticket to prosperity that he and others had promised. Osborne is a self-proclaimed disciple of President Lyndon Johnson, a master of American political strategy, but a serial offender when it came to opening the gap between rhetoric and reality.
He was forced to withdraw from the race for re-election in 1968 when the Tet Offensive made a nonsense of his assurances that America was close to victory in Vietnam.
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But before that, indeed 50 years ago this month, Johnson delivered the prime case study in what happens when politics comes between the public and the truth.
In August 1965, as the riot fires still smouldered in the Watts district of Los Angeles and funerals for its 34 victims were held, Johnson ordered his aides to prepare a package of emergency support for the area, but “in total secrecy, absolutely no leaks”.
He was terrified that the American public would conclude that the rioters were being rewarded for their actions and little wonder, given the scale of the reward. The Watts riots produced a deluge of federal funding for the area, directly employing tens of thousands of those who had rioted, and seeking to address their key grievances.
In the year before August 1965, the Watts district received the least federal money per impoverished family in all America — just $25 on average. In the year following the riots, Watts went to the top of the list with an average allocation of $158 per family, an increase of 532 per cent.
In this urban slum, even the US Department of Agriculture got in on the act, distributing free school food and milk and waiving its normal police record checks so it could offer immediate employment to 5,000 young Watts residents in its California forestry service.
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Furthermore, among Johnson’s aides, the reality of the riots was clearly understood.
They knew that the looting and burning of buildings had been highly selective; they knew that the riots enjoyed broad-based community support; and they knew that the existence of snipers targeting police or outside agitators whipping up the riots were myths.
Johnson’s own task force into the riots was unflinching in its presentation of the Watts residents’ anger, and proposed far-reaching solutions for every complaint from rent rates to children’s health.
It concluded: “America faces a challenge it will not be able to meet unless it has the understanding, concern and action of all our governments . . . and of all our people.”
Johnson refused even to let the report be published. Instead, for purely political reasons, he instructed California’s Democratic governor, Pat Brown, to appoint ex-CIA chief John McCone to lead an inquiry, knowing that Brown faced a tough re-election battle against Ronald Reagan and needed a solid, conservative report to shore up his position. McCone’s report was a travesty, suggesting that only 5 per cent of Watts residents were involved in the riot, and that they were criminal “riff-raff”, their destructive anger and acquisitive greed exploited by militant agitators.
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Johnson himself publicly compared the Watts rioters to the Ku Klux Klan, and repeated the myth that snipers had been involved.
Watts was an opportunity for the Johnson administration to lead public understanding of the realities of the riots, their causes, and their ultimate solutions. Instead, it actively allowed a false narrative about the riots to take hold, increasing racial division in the country, destroying the political consensus behind further progress on civil rights, and ensuring even more destructive and widespread rioting for the rest of Johnson’s presidency.
Outside wartime, it was the ultimate demonstration that a government without the courage to tell the public the reality will end up making that reality far worse.
The Chinese government could reflect on this, as it continues to pump prime an already dangerously over-inflated economy. The US Federal Reserve could do likewise, as it contemplates backing down on its threat to raise interest rates.
And here in Britain, the Labour party faces a more complex dilemma. Some will argue that by embracing Jeremy Corbyn it is denying the reality of the last election result and buying into the rhetoric that what the public want is an even more left-wing alternative.
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His supporters will counter that Corbyn has been successful precisely because he is that rare politician whose rhetoric is firmly steeped in reality: he is unafraid to tell it the way he sees it. I suspect they are right, and Labour will soon have a party leader prepared to tell what he sees as the unvarnished truth. Whether the electorate will agree with him is debatable, but history suggests it’s worth a try.