‘Post-truth’ is the Oxford Dictionaries Word of Year 2016. Fancy that, but what does it mean?
Post-truth, adjective, ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
More than being the OED’s ‘Word of the Year’, what is more significant is that it is ‘the Word’ of this year, 2016. It is a word that is being crowned ‘in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States’ and also because it has ‘become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics’ [1]. Even fancier, but can we look at it a bit closer?
The Economist tweeted [2] a short and witty primer: “Obama founded ISIS. George Bush was behind 9/11. Welcome to post-truth politics.” In coining the term, David Roberts [3] explained that it runs somewhat counter to ‘the idealized Enlightenment view’ that voters gather facts, then draw conclusions from those facts, choose issue positions based on those conclusions and then back the political party that champions those issues. He points out that the political sciences have revealed a different story: that voters choose a party or tribe based on value affiliations, adopt the issue positions of the tribe, develop arguments to support those positions, and choose facts to bolster those arguments. Post-truth politics, then, refers to a political culture in which ‘politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from legislative policy’ which ‘dims any hope of reasoned legislative compromise’. It doesn’t matter, he says, if a party in power adopts a policy supported by the opposition a year ago; the opposition opposes for the sake of opposition alone.
In this day and age, we cannot deny the accuracy of this assessment. This is politics; but is it modern politics? To be more specific, is post-truth politics a novelty that has manifested in the political developments of 2016, notably Brexit and Trump? That, on the other hand, would be pure rubbish.
Shortly after the Trump victory and the Democratic reaction, a video of British satirist Jonathan Pie (Tom Walker) went viral on Facebook. In his characteristic and brutal rant, he lashes out at the Left/Liberal Establishment for its fundamentalist behaviors that came to the fore during the dramatic US elections. He points out how the ‘blaming and shaming’ by the Left has exposed its intellectual poverty, how it has lost the art of respecting (and trying to persuade) those who think differently.
“Trump won […] because the Left has decided that any other way of looking at the world is unacceptable. […] If you’re on the right, it means you’re a freak, you’re evil, you’re a racist, you’re sexist, you’re stupid, you’re a basket of deplorables. […] Not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist or a sexist. […] Stop labelling people just because they disagree with you.”
This left-leaning extremism (under the guise of ‘liberalism’), where anything not conforming to the perceived ‘progressive and liberal’ order of things must be vilified and demonized, blamed for all inequities and cursed to suffer is nothing new. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has argued that labels are fundamental to Leftist thought—fueled by the need to identify certain groups (‘bourgeoisie’, etc.) who are somehow made out to be ‘responsible’ for social inequities—stigmatizing the ‘enemy’ and justifying their expulsion. Anything can then be done in the name of justice; but when the conservative seeks to prevent something, one can be sure that it is not from ‘moral conviction’, but from ‘indignation, intolerance and disgust’.
“[…] By a relentless campaign of intimidation, left-wing thinkers have sought to make it unacceptable to be on the right. […] Once identified as right-wing, you are beyond the pale of argument; your views are irrelevant, your character discredited, your presence in the world a mistake. You are not an opponent to be argued with, but a disease to be shunned.” — Roger Scruton
This is what creates a ‘bubble’, which hides the too-ugly-to-face reality and within which we remain confined to: namely, that it is, in fact, too uncomfortably similar to the ‘negative forces’ (the conservatives and the reactionaries) that it purportedly struggles against in the name of an ever-elusive ‘social justice’. In claiming a higher moral ground where none exists, in championing a superior political order where ‘superior’ is always conveniently and unrealistically defined, in creating an elite within a purported egalitarianism, and in refusing to accord dissenters the respect that it so demands from those dissenters, it exposes its fundamental hypocrisy and shameless pretentiousness.
The appointment of ‘post-truth’ as the Word of the Year 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries is—to borrow a phrase from the British comedy Yes, Prime Minister—the Left/Liberal Establishment ‘at play’. By being linked to political developments like Brexit (UK) and Trump (USA) as well as with Marine LePen (France), Geert Wilders (Netherlands) and the AfD (Germany), ‘post-truth’ is now the newest label. Assessing reactions from Europeans leaders to the presidential victory of Donald Trump, The Telegraph laments [5] that the European liberal establishment—the ‘liberal ancien regimes’ of today—must ‘learn humility and stop bashing Donald Trump’, but the message appears to have been wasted on us.
Yet ‘post-truth’ is no innovation for the Left is no stranger to it. Where was post-truth when the thinkers of the New Left forged the grand narratives in which social inequalities, wars, genocides were attributed to designated groups of people and inter-group struggles? Where was post-truth when totalitarian dictatorships rode in with utopian visions of ‘classless societies’ fueled by the fundamentalist zeal to seize and redistribute the assets of society in accordance with a ‘plan’ and bring about a fabled ’emancipation’ through a ‘revolutionary working class’ united with ‘intellectuals’? No figure stands taller than the venerable Karl Marx himself when it comes to making politics indifferent to truth by elevating it to the lofty realms of metaphysics, safely beyond the paltry reaches of facts and figures. Where was post-truth when simple categories were blown out of proportion at the expense of historical complexity and all history hitherto was declared ipso facto to be ‘the history of class struggles’?
The implied conflation of ‘post-truth’ and ‘right-wing’ is a last-ditch attempt by a belligerent elite purportedly committed to egalitarianism yet desperate to cling on to its intellectual privilege and remain in the corridors of power. But the chasm between these ‘pro-prole posers’ (the proletariat-championing leftists) and the actual working class have simply become too big to ignore [7,8]. The idea of a ‘planned’ society has always attracted intellectuals, Roger Scruton noted [6], as long as they believe they will remain in charge of it, but now the ‘snob-rule of the few’ stands threatened by the ‘mob-rule of the many’.
Post-truth has become the new ‘sour grapes’. Grappled with the rising political challenges and defeats like Brexit and Trump, the despair has become too much to bear, the reality has become too unreal to face—unworthy of being truth any longer. Truth must now re-defined: what we did was truth, what they’re doing is post-truth. Truth must no longer legitimize the politics of Brexit and Trump, it’s not allowed to. No matter how democratic it is, the rug must be pulled out from under. We have lost our power to them; we cannot lose our truth too. So much for democracy.
Post-truth politics is real, but there is nothing new about it. The political right has never had a monopoly on it, for the Left has long mastered the subtle art of post-truth.
Notes
1. Oxford Dictionaries. Word of the Year 2016. November 8, 2016. (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016)
2.The Economist. The art of the lie. September 10, 2016. (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-truth-behind-entirely-art)
3. Grist. David Roberts. Post-truth politics. April 1st, 2010. (https://grist.org/article/2010-03-30-post-truth-politics/)
4. Jonathan Pie. President Trump: How and Why. November 10, 2016. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs)
5. The Telegraph. Peter Foster. Europe’s liberal establishment must learn some humility and stop bashing Donald Trump – or face an American backlash. November 14, 2016. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/14/European-liberal-establishment-must-learn-humility-in-new-era-of-president-donald-trump/)
6. Roger Scruton. Fools, frauds and firebrands. Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury. 2015 (originally published in 1985).
7. Spiked. Tom Slater. Remain: The Left has lined up with the Establishment. June 22, 2016. (http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/remain-the-left-has-lined-up-with-the-establishment-eu-brexit/18483#.WDSN1fl97IV)
8. The Guardian. Paul Mason. Brexit is a fake revolt – Working class culture is being hijacked to help the elite. June 20, 2016. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/20/brexit-fake-revolt-eu-working-class-culture-hijacked-help-elite)