When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

Abstract

This article presents results froma series of online surveys-conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration-that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientationsmay be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.