Once upon a time you could at least count on the vast majority of politicians in either party telling the truth some of the time and there being at least a grain or shade of truth in the rest of their statements. Like everything else in politics the speaking habits of the majority of politicians in both parties have polarized.
The majority of the Republican Party, in its efforts to hang on to what it believes are its core supporters, has essentially decided that even a pretense at speaking something vaguely resembling the facts is not only unnecessary, but that the only way it can hold onto any power – and possibly even win the next election – is to spread lies and more lies. Lies, of course, that are more attractive to Republican rank-and-file than the truth.
Now, there’s always been a strain of this in politics, the most notable in recent eras being the Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who invented the numbers of Communists he thought was plausible in whatever group he was targeting at that moment. There’s also been a strain of virulent anti-immigrant “nativist” politics throughout our entire history as a nation. The “anti-black” politics permeated the Democratic Party until Lyndon Johnson pushed for civil rights, and then those who opposed full civil rights [or sometimes any civil rights] migrated to the Republican Party.
For all that, the current lies pushed by Republicans pretty much take the cake. No other political party has ever tried to deny the results of any national election by force. Sometimes, they’ve manipulated the system, but having a sitting President incite a riot to deny the results of an election is unprecedented. When a Republican congressman says that the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol wasn’t much more than a normal tourist event, when the Republican leader in the House of Representatives continues to insist that the election was stolen, when the Republican Party strips one of the most conservative members of its conference of her post because she stood up against those lies, it’s not about political beliefs, and it’s certainly not about anything close to the truth.
Now… the Democrats aren’t saints, and they often are very “selective” about the truth, but at least there’s some truth somewhere. They do have facts and statistics about oppression and Republican voter suppression, about poverty, and about the inadequacy of the minimum wage. It’s a shame that they’re not nearly as strong about economics, but we can survive bad economics, partly because economics work, despite the politicians, but laws based on lies will destroy a democratic society long before bad economics will, and bad economics can be fixed without resorting to a civil war.
After all, the last time states decided that mandating oppression and denying the vote was a state’s right didn’t turn out all that well.