Félix Edouard Vallotton: The Lie, plate one from Intimacies (1897)

“Those who had most loudly insisted that faceless bureaucrats had compromised our country became the faceless bureaucrats about who they so publicly complained.”

The Biggest Lie in American politics insisted that our country has been stolen by faceless bureaucrats and, in its later configurations, by an unidentified "Deep State." It insisted that our government no longer belonged to us because its laws seemed to hurt rather than reward us. Of special focus, income taxes were characterized as theft and government services as "inefficient," another undefined term intended to mean "wasteful." Lost in these arguments was any sense of how wealthy our country was, perhaps because few could even distantly imagine how wealthy that might have actually been. It was easier for most of us to imagine our government's finances as roughly similar to our household, where perennial income shortfalls continually threatened solvency when we were collectively wealthy beyond almost anyone's wildest imagination. We were in the postwar years, rich enough to personally bankroll the economies of Britain, Europe, and Japan. Our debt became the free world's burgeoning prosperity, and we more than made back every penny we expended, whether in direct aid or financing.

We were so wealthy during the immediate postwar period that our government spent the equivalent of the value of every bit of privately held property on defenses we would never use, and this while steadily increasing the support supplied to disadvantaged citizens. Those at the very top of the income scale received far more than their fair share of such subsidies, along with tax bills that insisted they contribute their fair share to the public purse. This was characterized as an intolerable intrusion on the sanctity of wealth, for capital was then considered to be one of an essentially holy trinity that included all private property as distinguished from any public goods. As a government founded to ensure its citizens' pursuit of happiness, we could have guaranteed every citizen's income, health, education, and welfare. Still, the liars complained about how that would be like communism, which it wasn't, or communism light, which was labeled socialism, which seemed little better. We chose to withhold subsidizing those requiring the most support, giving a unique advantage to those who probably didn't need such support. Those receiving the greatest tribute complained most about what little was given to those most in need. Much of this was fueled by racism.

Ronald Reagan, once his acting career ended, entered politics. First, he headed the Screen Actor's Guild, a union comprised of movie actors, where he set about ratting out those he considered to be dangerous citizens, communists. He helped ruin the careers of several remarkable actors and helped fuel the paranoia that would encourage conservatives to swallow The Biggest Lie later. Reagan entered the lucrative field of corporate spokespersons, where he gave keynote speeches and narrated reactionary right-wing films supporting a new corporatism. He worked for General Electric as it became the centerpiece of what Eisenhower warned could come to threaten us: the Military-Industrial Complex. GE was generally right-wing reactionary on social issues. It stood firmly against taxation, even with adequate representation, and for hefty no-bid government contracts to build super secret things they could never be held publicly accountable for creating. By the sixties, they became arguably the most powerful corporate presence in the country, and Ronald Reagan was their public face. He hosted television's ever-popular General Electric Theater and, later, Death Valley Days, where he lent his soothing, slightly sardonic baritone to promoting “real” Americans' interests.

The others never needed to be defined, just labeled as communists. Otherwise decent Americans could be deposed by the scantest disclosure. "Did you ever join this or that organization when you attended college?" If you had, you could be labeled a "Card-Carrying Communist," which was, supposedly, much, much worse than the communists who had never carried cards. The purges continued. Richard Nixon joined in. As Vice President, he held some backroom weight in the Senate. He was the early favorite to become President in 1960, except Kennedy out-maneuvered him at the polls. Barry Goldwater ran toward the even more radical right when he ran for office in '63, losing handily to the man who had been the king of the Senate and Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, in his own words, went on to give away the South by championing and signing into law strong desegregation laws. Nothing more offends a "real" American than desegregation. He successfully championed more social legislation than anyone in history. He also got blindsided by that military-industrial complex in Vietnam. When he chose not to run for reelection, Nixon stepped in and started stoking The Big Lie that Reagan would ultimately step into solidify into a curious kind of common sense, the kind, of course, that otherwise couldn't possibly have made a lick of sense to anybody but the ever-hungry oligarchy.

Nixon introduced a "silent majority" to represent what would have otherwise just qualified as misrepresentation. He was curiously beset by unidentifiable enemies from within. Watergate proved, to him, if few others, that the government operated as a nefarious presence, undermining a president's prerogatives. As Nixon insisted, if a president does it, it's legal. Say what you will about corruption in the FBI, it sometimes delivered the goods, if often barely in time. The government as a whole managed to weather the Nixon years. We even elected a decent man to be our President, Jimmy Carter, over Big Liar Ronald Reagan. Decency, though, had always been the mortal enemy of The Big Lie, so the military-industrial complex redoubled its efforts to elect The Biggest Liar President and finally succeeded in 1980. It was downhill from there. The looting of the public purse immediately commenced. Tax cuts became an issue of the day. Well, tax cuts for the all-important wealthiest sectors. A clever fictional invention sanctioned by a few well-placed, bought-off academics, Trickle-Down Economics explained how drastically cutting government revenues would eventually benefit everybody. Immediately for the wealthiest, then later for all the others. No record of this working was ever recorded, yet the concept remains extremely popular among those with the most to gain from it. Their coup was against common sense.

In some ways, malign actors had compromised our government, just not the actors popularly characterized. The ones reporting the overthrow were intent on taking down the government tent. They were the ones complaining about welfare queens while they were receiving the lion's share of the skim. Reagan still holds the record for the most members of a presidential administration jailed for their activities while in office. He oversaw by far the most corrupt administration as measured by resulting felons of any in the country's history. If anybody was trying to steal the country from the rest of us, it was those most proudly declaiming the theft by others. This was clever misdirection. The thieves called in a fire alarm to cover up their crime. It worked much better than they ever expected. Eventually, their Republican Party, that one that had always presented itself as for God and Country, became the party opposed to the country they had been elected to administer as if that somehow equated with godliness. They set about funneling as much of that great collective wealth as possible into the pockets of the already wealthiest. Those who had most loudly insisted that faceless bureaucrats had compromised our country became the faceless bureaucrats about who they so publicly complained. Their issue continued to be that some of that unimaginable wealth might be left over to benefit somebody else, which would, of course, have been a travesty.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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