Big Lie politics. How long can the core lies last?

Let me begin by saying that I’m not trying to indict any current political statement with this question. That is for separate discussions. I want here just to look at the Big Lie strategy itself. As the idiom states, ’‘Truth will out.’’ Truth is supported by evidence and facts. Lies are not. Lies will eventually be exposed, and truth will triumph.

Hitler’s propaganda henchman, Joseph Goebbels, the original proponent of Big Lie politics, warned that the lie can’t last. Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” So what’s the half-life of the political Big Lie?”

Hitler’s central lie was the scapegoating of Jews. He wrongly claimed that all Germany’s problems were the fault of the Jews, and when the state solved “The Jewish Problem” all would be wonderful. This lie found sympathetic ears in the depth of the Great Depression and runaway inflation within the Weimar Republic. But if a political party ran on the same platform in today’s Germany, they would get nowhere. That lie is dead. How long does it take typically for the truth to trump a widely publicized and seductive Big Lie?