One of the biggest rationalizations/copouts in politics today is one used by far too many voters, usually when someone makes an observation about one politician’s unethical or potentially illegal behavior or the politician’s blatant falsehoods. Those who want to support the politician, despite that behavior or those lies, all too often say, “All politicians are crooks” or “They all lie.”

To begin with, every single human being who reaches adulthood has lied. That’s not the question. The question is what kind of lies they told and to whom. Were they white lies to spare someone’s feelings? Or lies to excuse their own failures, like claiming they were late to work because an accident backed up traffic when they really overslept because they were hung over. Or were they lies like those told by former President Trump? The other question is how often and how blatant the lies.

When we deal with acquaintances, most people weigh the “shades of gray” in judging people, but when they deal with politicians, from what I’ve seen, the smallest fault in a politician one doesn’t like or who’s of the “wrong” party is enough to justify voting for a politician with far greater faults who comes from the “right” party. People shy away from dealing with shady merchants or car dealers, but they don’t show the same reluctance when a shady politician from their own party spouts blatant falsehoods.

And usually, neither candidate is perfectly pure. When that happens, a large segment of each party tends to justify staying with the party candidate by magnifying the sins of the opposition candidate, rather than by comparing their actions and statements of the two [now, most people say they do this, but it’s clear from election results that many don’t].

Sometimes, voters believe that the principles a politician opposes or supports justify voting for that politician, despite his or her flaws, but how large do the flaws have to be before voters turn away from a flawed politician? How outrageous do the falsehoods and lies have to get before voters reject a politician from their own party?

Some voters never do, and that was how the Germans ended up with Hitler, the Italians with Mussolini, the Russians with Putin, and why Trump believes he can run and win a second term.

The other day, I got an email cartoon listing nineteen goods/categories whose prices have increased 10% or more over the past year. Nine were grocery products and one was men’s suits. The others were categories: gasoline, airline tickets, used cars, gas utilities, hotels, delivery costs, electricity, furniture, and cleaning products. The bottom line caption was: So how is inflation only 8.6%?

I checked the numbers against the latest CPI-U, and some were exaggerated. The email said used car prices were up 35%, but the CPI lists the annual inflation at 7.8% The email also listed gasoline increases at 49%, when the actual was 29%.

But the most misleading aspect is that all of the items listed by the email together comprise less than 30% of all the items that comprise the CPI-U. All food items comprise only 14%. Eggs [up 44%] only amount to 1/10 of one percent.

Overall food prices (comprising 14% of the CPI-U) increased 11.4%, but all commodity prices, excluding food and energy, only rose 6.3% over the last year.

Now neither 8.6% nor 6.3% is good, but citing huge price spikes in small segments of the economy is definitely misleading. It’s also politically effective. People don’t notice the prices that don’t rise or rise more slowly. They notice that gasoline and egg prices are way up, or that used cars are getting pricy.

Yet, I’d be willing to be that the majority of people who received that email or saw the original posting of the cartoon and its statistics will have the reaction that the government is grossly “cooking the statistics.”

And the government has been “readjusting” the statistics for years, but in little ways, such as reducing the impact of food and energy costs on the CPI, but its figures aren’t “readjusted” by the two and three-fold magnitudes suggested by the cartoon.

This statistical “discrepancy” also illustrates one of the biggest problems faced by a democratic high technology society, that fewer and fewer of the people who vote really understand either the technology or the economy underlying their society, and that lack of understanding becomes fertile ground for demagogues who offer falsified/incorrect facts, gross exaggerations, and beguiling simple (but unworkable) “solutions” to complex problems.

All fiction rests on, as the British poet Coleridge put it more than two centuries ago, “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” But what continually surprises me is what aspects of “disbelief” various readers are willing to suspend (and what they are not), as well as what suspensions various authors expect of their readers.

As authors, we all have beliefs and preferences. As my readers know, I try hard to provide workable economic and political systems as a framework for my novels, and this carries over into my reading. While I’m more willing to accept an unworkable economic or political system in a fantasy, particularly when the plot doesn’t depend primarily on either, if I’m reading science fiction, especially hard science fiction, totally unworkable politics and economics are usually a total turn-off for me. Likewise, a cast of characters with no visible means of support tends to make suspension of disbelief difficult for me. But that’s me.

Everyone has different parameters for what aspects of “disbelief” can be suspended, and sometimes I find what readers can and cannot accept as “literarily believable” rather, shall I say, interesting. There are readers who can easily accept order and chaos magic but cannot believe the way certain female characters in my books behave [even though that behavior is modeled on that of my wife and my numerous daughters].

There is, of course, a difference between willingness to suspend disbelief and disliking the way characters are portrayed, but there’s a definite crossover. Readers who aren’t fond of strong women are going to have more trouble suspending disbelief when they encounter a female character who’s not particularly tolerant of male chauvinism, misogyny, and patriarchal power. Readers who are fond of action will be less likely to suspend disbelief when a character has to deal with a great deal of bureaucracy, subtlety, and intrigue.

From what I’ve observed, readers are far more likely to suspend disbelief about politics, economics, and technology than about interpersonal relationships and social structures, although this has changed significantly over the past thirty years. Even so, radically changed socio-economic structures are still comparatively infrequent, possibly because they’re hard for many readers to even imagine, let alone accept as “realistic” enough to suspend disbelief.

And, in the end, because one of the reasons why people read fiction is to escape reality, fiction that is apparently “farther” from reality draws more readers than fiction closer to reality, but that’s often an illusion, because while the magic or technology vary greatly from reality, societal basics seldom do, which is why an older book such as The Left Hand of Darkness still stands out.

For the past three months I’ve been inundated with appeals for funds by various Republican and Democratic candidates and both political parties. But I’ve noticed that there’s a fundamental difference.

Almost every Republican appeal is not only fear-based, but it’s always about how those vile Democrats are going to take away “your freedoms.” They’re going to take away your freedom to own a gun [despite the fact that the Second Amendment preludes that, if admittedly, Democrats possibly might not allow high-speed, multiple-shot, mass-killing weapons]. Republicans charge that Democrats will have the FBI raiding your home [especially if you have top-secret documents illegally]. They’re going to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, and all of them are after you [even though the point of the agents and the additional funds is to answer phone calls the IRS hasn’t had enough people to answer for years; to handle tax returns that have taken extra months, if not years, to process; to fill vacancies that have existed for years; and to have enough people to go after high-income tax cheats, who’ve gotten away with fraudulent tax returns for years]. Yes, those Democrats are going to take away your country [that is, they want true equality for all ethnicities and genders]. They’ll take away your freedom to infect other people [can’t have required immunizations even when they’ve proved to reduce and eliminate childhood and other deaths from infectious diseases]. And, of course, they’ll actually charge the Republicans’ beloved Donald Trump with the crimes he’s already committed.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are more concerned about freedoms that the Republicans have already restricted or attempted to restrict, such as women’s freedom to control their own bodies and reproductive rights. Democrats also oppose Republican initiatives and recent laws that make it harder for ethnic minorities to vote and thus to hold office, as well as legal and legislative initiatives to allow state government officials to override election results, which Republicans have already done in several states with regard to legal ballot initiatives. Democrats also oppose Republican bans on books that only Republicans seem to find objectionable.

So, from what I can see, Republicans are fearmongering on what Democrats might do, even when such acts are Constitutionally impossible, while Democrats are fearmongering about what Republicans have already done and what they want to extend to the whole country.

Whether many people, especially Republicans, will understand the difference is another question.

I’ve recently noticed a trend – or maybe it’s always been there – in various reviews, both of my books and others, of a view of ethics by reviewers that seems to believe that compromises to power and reality are always sell-outs.

Unhappily, this view has also dominated U.S. politics for at least the last decade, if not longer. The far right wants to ban all abortions all the time; the far left wants no restrictions on abortion. Polls show that the majority of Americans want something in the middle, roughly along the lines of Roe v. Wade. But the battle lines remain.

For years, Congress has been stalled on issues dealing with climate reform, a better IRS system, the high cost of prescription drugs, getting wealthy corporations to pay taxes, and the need to reduce health insurance costs for poorer families.

In early 2021, the President proposed a $3 trillion program to address such problems. The Republicans’ counter was to say that they were opposed to all of it, despite the problems. For a year and a half, the Democrats, despite having control of Congress, if only by one vote in the Senate, couldn’t agree on anything.

Once the Democrats realized that only by compromising among themselves could they get anything done did they finally pass the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which everyone should know won’t do all it promises. No one got all of what they wanted. Did that mean that the Democrats lost their ethics? Or did it mean that they did the best they could?

As for the Republicans, their “ethical” position was that they’d oppose anything. Most likely, if they’d really agreed to compromise, the final legislation would have been better. But they opposed compromise.

But what too many people tend to ignore, forget, or fail to acknowledge is that getting almost anything done in government requires compromise, not getting all that you think necessary, and having to accept things you think are unnecessary or even wrong.

Accepting compromise doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost your ethics. It may mean that your opponents have more votes and/or power. And for those who refuse compromise, especially when not acting means people will suffer, it suggests that some people believe so highly in their view of what’s ethical that they’d rather have people suffer or die than do what they think is “unethical.” And what does that say about their “ethics”?