Has lying become too easy, in both the America of George Santos and Vladimir Putin’s Russia? (Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash)

You may see George Santos as the inevitable product of Donald Trump’s Republican party — the unlikely congressman who made up his life story being, in that view, just gooey flotsam in the backwash of a White House that itself floated on fabrications, ranging from the Inauguration Day weather to the president’s body weight.

True enough, but the longer Santos hangs around Washington, the more clearly we realize that he’s not just an heir to Trump’s malignancy, but also a disciple of Vladimir Putin’s strategy. Consider: Both Putin and Santos are pushing forward, never mind the criticism based on morality or legality, and both wager they can win by outlasting their adversaries. Really, if Putin’s Russia wasn’t so anti-gay, Santos would fit right in at the Kremlin.

It has become clear that the Russian strongman and the American flimflam man are now following the same playbook. Putin assumes he can prosecute his war in Ukraine longer than the West can sustain its united stand against him; Santos figures he can stay in office after the novelty of his story wears thin and the mainstream media turns its attention to pressing matters elsewhere. And just as Putin can count on support from other anti-Western powers, Santos knows that what matters to his party is not who he is, but who he stands against.  

That’s why Santos isn’t just a shake-your-head sideshow revealing how far American conservatism has fallen from the standards of integrity exemplified by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and John McCain. He actually represents the broad threat that is posed by a major political party’s unmooring from truth.

Yes, Santos may be brought down eventually by his alleged financial crimes. Prosecutors seem to be interested in how a guy who couldn’t pay his rent found $700,000 to lend to his campaign. But what if he hadn’t needed money? The embrace of Santos by Republican leaders who matter, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, suggests he could skate through to success. In fact, a well-funded fabulist might see in George Santos the very model of the modern-day successful politician.

So worry about this: Santos could be the future of our democracy.

In fact, Santos is these days behaving largely as any freshman lawmaker would — putting his name on legislation that might be popular with his constituents and standing wherever a spotlight might shine upon him favorably. New York magazine noted this week that Santos seems to be actually enjoying his notoriety, a notion that led the article’s author, Shawn McCreesh, to conclude, “Sometimes you’re famous just for being infamous, and that is enough.”

To be sure, Santos seems unlikely to outrun everybody who is chasing him down for the astounding web of lies he created. The Justice Department has opened an investigation of his campaign finances, and this week the House Ethics Committee launched its own probe. Based on what has already been uncovered by aggressive journalists — which seems to point to perjury, financial fraud and theft — it’s hard to imagine that Santos will be out on the campaign trail in 2024.

But none of the investigations are touching the elements that made Santos the only freshman member of Congress known not just in his own district, but nationally. He has gotten widespread attention not for his seeming flouting of the laws governing campaign finances, but for the brazen misrepresentation of his personal background. And while that seems to hardly trouble the leaders of his party, it has made him a genuine celebrity on the far right.

Lots of politicians commit financial crimes, after all, and we remember few of their names. We know Santos, though, for the fabrication of a backstory, which is arguably what got him elected: He made up where he went to college (and he wasn’t a star on their championship volleyball team), where he worked (not for big Wall Street firms), heart-rending connections to 9/11 and the Pulse nightclub shootings (respectively, in fact, probably none and almost none) and that he was the grandson of Jewish Holocaust survivors (his grandparents were born in Brazil).

So an ambitious young politician might reasonably conclude that you can lie absurdly and still get ahead in politics, as long as you don’t break the law. It’s not a crime to lie to voters; indeed, it has come to be a mark of belonging in today’s Republican party. Santos represents the evolution of the party that once rather ostentatiously stood for rectitude and virtue, but which now has habituated lying.

The course of that Republican devolution is charted by Dana Milbank, a columnist for The Washington Post, in his book published last year, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. Milbank tracks the through-line from Newt Gingrich’s strategy to win the House for Republicans in 1994 by hyperbolically portraying Democrats as traitors to America.

The peril this presents is embedded in human nature — or, specifically, in the portion of the brain known as the amygdala. Sophisticated imaging experiments at University College London have shown that the amygdala — which controls our behavioral and emotional responses — adapts to dishonest behavior. Thus, small lies over time make bigger lies easier for our brains to accept, the researchers concluded, and minor acts of dishonesty more easily escalate into larger ones.

The same effect the researchers found in individuals is apparent throughout the party of Trump and Santos. Now we have Republicans setting up a subcommittee to probe imagined “weaponizing” of the federal government, which is itself a weaponizing of Congress for partisan ends. We have Stefanik, whose ambition has clearly outrun her conscience, falsely characterizing poll data to claim that the 2020 presidential election results — which she voted to overturn, based on the false claim of fraudulent ballots — would have been changed if voters had known what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop. We have Ron DeSantis, supposedly a less divisive character than Trump, falsely claiming that the bivalent booster vaccine increases the chance that people will get Covid-19.

Nobody who has any clout in the Republican party is calling out these or countless other lies by Republican officials — any more than you hear politicians in Russia disputing Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to liberate the people from a Nazi government, or than his troops are not targeting civilians, or that Russia is winning the war. A pattern of lies has in both cases led to a tolerance of more lies, with potentially tragic results on both sides of the East-West divide.

Ironically, it is the reality of the Republican decline into chronic dishonesty that best argues for the party’s rejuvenation in our political scheme. Putin’s easy deception shows what can happen when a society lacks a strong political opposition, and why we must fight that prospect here. America needs two parties that openly and honestly compete on the same field, so that citizens can choose the nation’s course. If one party doesn’t play by the rules — which surely must include a basic respect for facts — then we are aimed toward the sort of imbalance that allows the public will to be distorted and perverted by those who care less about the basic human right to self-government. (Citizens’ power is similarly hobbled if they don’t get access to truthful reporting on public officials, which is why the right-wing propaganda of Fox News is so toxic. But that’s another column.)

The fact that Kevin McCarthy and his enablers won’t do anything about the perfidy of George Santos reveals that a quarter century of distortion of truth, year by year and issue by issue, has yielded a discernible and dangerous wave of disrespect for democracy. It may be no easier to reverse the current that has yielded such an apathetic response to the epidemic of falsehoods than it will be to turn aside the Russian assault on self-determination in Ukraine. Santos, no less than Putin, reveals that the fight for truth is always one that demands more perseverance and energy than we might have imagined.

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