Post-truth politics
Post-truth politics is a term used to describe a political environment where objective facts are overshadowed by subjective emotions and beliefs. In this landscape, the boundaries between truth and falsehood become blurred, allowing politicians to manipulate information by intermingling misleading claims with facts to craft narratives that resonate emotionally with the public. This phenomenon gained significant attention around 2016, particularly in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and Donald Trump's presidential election campaign, both of which were marked by the prevalence of "fake news" and emotionally charged rhetoric.
Historically, the manipulation of truth in politics can be traced back to ancient philosophical discussions, such as Plato's concept of the "noble lie," and further explored by theorists like Machiavelli. The rise of postmodernism has also been linked to post-truth politics, as it challenges traditional notions of objectivity and presents reality as a complex interplay of subjective experiences. Contemporary examples of post-truth dynamics include the Watergate scandal and the justification for the 2003 Iraq invasion, where emotional appeals often took precedence over factual accuracy. These elements illustrate how post-truth politics reflects broader cultural shifts and poses significant challenges for democratic discourse.
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Post-truth politics
The concept of post-truth politics refers to a political landscape in which objective facts carry less importance than the subjective feelings and emotions of the voting public. In post-truth politics, the normal distinction between facts and falsehoods is effectively erased, creating a dynamic that enables politicians to present misleading or manufactured claims as fact, or to interweave deceptive claims with fact-based statements to create engineered social and political narratives. Politicians use the blurred distinction between objectivity and subjectivity to validate the public's underlying feelings about particular political and social issues, thus convincing them to support candidates and policies that align with their emotions rather than making decisions based on empirical evidence.
Post-truth politics rose to prominence in the public consciousness in 2016, largely as a result of voters in the United Kingdom choosing to leave the European Union (EU) and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. The Oxford Dictionaries later named post-truth as 2016's word of the year.
Background
Political commentators have long noted the malleable relationship between facts and political discourse. The ancient Greek thinker Plato famously explored the notion of the "noble lie" in his dialogue The Republic, which is one of history's most widely studied works of political philosophy. In The Republic, Plato argues that lies can be virtuous if they are used for the good of a state or its citizens. Niccolò Machiavelli, an influential Renaissance-era political theorist and author, carried such notions even further, removing any pretext of moral uprightness in advocating for righteous rulers to use any necessary means to secure and maintain their power. Machiavelli explained these concepts in his seminal work The Prince, originally published in 1513.
These underlying ideas inform the modern brand of post-truth politics, which began to take their current shape during the second half of the twentieth century. Many observers and analysts have pointed out parallels between the modern brand of post-truth politics and the fictional world portrayed in the famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by British author George Orwell in 1949. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a totalitarian government exerts complete control of a dystopian futuristic society by presenting manufactured reality as truth and persecuting those who question its validity.
Theorists have also drawn links between postmodernism and the rise of post-truth politics. Postmodernism is a set of philosophical and cultural ideas said to define the present age. The term entered the contemporary sociocultural vocabulary in 1979 with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by the French literary theorist, philosopher, and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard. Postmodernism's critique of objectivity is among its defining features, with extreme branches of postmodern thought even rejecting the notion of objectivity altogether. The postmodernist worldview problematizes traditional understandings of truth by presenting reality as a simulacrum of intermingled subjectivities. Post-truth politics is thus a poignant reflection of life in postmodern times, leaving academics and scholars to ponder the chicken-and-egg question of whether it is a product of postmodernity or whether it is an independent phenomenon that simply validates postmodern theory.
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The Watergate scandal that toppled the US presidency of Richard Nixon is a widely cited harbinger of contemporary post-truth politics. The scandal began to unfold in 1972, when burglars connected to Nixon were arrested after breaking into Democratic National Committee offices to steal documents and install wiretaps on internal telephone lines. Nixon and his staffers were recorded using terms such as "surreptitious entry" to describe the act of breaking and entering, while Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, infamously characterized his own initial statements of denial as "inoperative" once the incontestable truth about Nixon's involvement became public knowledge. In the 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by cultural historian Christopher Lasch, Ziegler's use of "inoperative" drew significant attention. Lasch's analysis points out that the term demonstrates that it was not the inherent falsity of Ziegler's initial statements that was problematic, but rather their lost potency as persuasive tools. The truth or falsity of Ziegler's original statements is not important; what mattered is whether or not they were able to influence public opinion.
Some have viewed the United States' decision to lead a coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 through the lens of post-truth politics. The invasion was justified by unsubstantiated claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding a secret stockpile of nuclear weapons in his country. Validation for the invasion also arose from a general desire for justice among members of the American public following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed thousands of civilians. Unproven rumors of Hussein's involvement in the attacks circulated in the media in their immediate aftermath. However, in 2006, some three years after the invasion of Iraq, US President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged that Hussein had no part in planning or executing the attacks. The episode thus offers a clear example of fabricated or misrepresented facts being used to generate emotional support for a controversial political policy.
In 2016, two key events ushered the notion of post-truth politics into the mainstream. First, the United Kingdom held a referendum to determine the country's future in the EU. British voters elected to leave the union, with analysts giving significant credit to an anti-EU propaganda campaign that emphasized the financial, social, and cultural costs of Britain's continued membership. The "leave" campaign authored an emotion-driven narrative that appealed to traditional notions of British identity and urged voters to reclaim their country from EU control, contributing to the "leave" side's surprising win. Donald Trump's victory in that year's presidential election also provided many examples of post-truth politics at work, with the much-publicized phenomenon of "fake news" being deployed to generate emotional responses among voters in both Republican and Democratic camps. In August 2016, The New York Times reported that about 70 percent of Trump's seemingly fact-based statements made during the lead-up to the November vote contained varying degrees of inaccuracy and misrepresentation. Yet, this did not dissuade the American people from electing him to office.
Trump's presidency met with an immediate controversy when media reports regarding the relatively small size of the crowd at his inauguration ceremony were contested by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Spicer claimed the crowd was the largest ever to witness a presidential inauguration, and when challenged on the veracity of his statements, presidential aide Kellyanne Conway famously retorted that Spicer was simply offering "alternative facts" to the account presented in the mainstream media. Alternative facts continued to color the Trump presidency. Social media sites, the conduits of many alternative facts, briefly employed fact-checking on posts that contained misinformation or misleading information; however, sites quickly abandoned those practices at the beginning of Donald Trump's second term in office.
Bibliography
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Al-Rodhan, Nayef. "Post-Truth Politics, the Fifth Estate, and the Securitization of Fake News." Global Policy, 7 June 2017, www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/07/06/2017/post-truth-politics-fifth-estate-and-securitization-fake-news. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.
Aylesworth, Gary "Postmodernism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5 Feb. 2015, plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.
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Freedland, Jonathan. "Post-Truth Politicians Such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson Are No Joke." The Guardian, 13 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/boris-johnson-donald-trump-post-truth-politician. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.
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Swaine, Jon. "Donald Trump's Team Defends 'Alternative Facts' after Widespread Protests." The Guardian, 23 Jan. 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-inauguration-alternative-facts. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.