‘Post truth politics’ is a phrase we hear a lot from the current political commentator. Numerous books have been published on the subject and the phrase has that effect of sounding scary before its meaning is even known. As ever with language the phrases we use can become shorthand for wider and more complex opinions and perceptions of the world. The phrase ‘fake-news’ popularized by Donald Trump on the campaign trail for his successful 2016 presidential bid has a literal meaning that can easily read: ‘news that is made up, misinformation, or most simply- lies’. But language isn’t just some extensive labeling system we’ve developed over the years to accurately translate physical phenomena into corresponding sounds. Language, words, phrases; they create. They create ideas, concepts, categories, whether it’s a genre of music, a personality trait, a country, or a brand. Which is why although ‘fake-news’ can be technically read as a neutral term, you won’t hear it used in a modern political context in a neutral way. When a Trump-voter uses the phrase ‘fake-news’ they are inferring not just that the thing they are responding to is false, they are linking it to a whole network of associated ideas that formed part of the phrases conception, how it was born into existence, and it’s constitution- the notions and ideas that make it up. Ideas like a liberal media establishment hellbent on discrediting their president and their movement.
In the same vein as ‘fake-news’, ‘post-truth-politics’- whilst also having an easily interpreted literal meaning ‘politics that comes after truth'- is similarly never used in a neutral way. Phrases like these are always loaded. ‘Post truth politics’ is usually said by people in the center or left as a lament for what they perceive to have happened to ‘politics’. In this way it is a partisan phrase, and one that is used to denote some kind of defect in the current situation.
Political positions always rest upon an assumption about reality. Right-wing beliefs such as the importance and even sanctity of individual responsibility rest on assumptions like ‘it’s people’s choice to be homeless’ and more abstractly, viewing individual responsibility as synonymous with freedom and democracy, and that letting some people fall through the cracks is the price we must pay for this higher ideal. Left-wing beliefs such as viewing the ultra-rich as undeserving of that wealth rest on assumptions that wealth is not representative of hard work or moral virtue, and that people don’t deserve to be rich or poor, they end up rich, poor, or in between as a result of circumstance, therefore rendering the imbalance of wealth inherently unfair.
For the right, the assumption of the importance of individual responsibility results in policies like shrinking the welfare state and lowering taxes. For the left, the assumption of faultlessness of circumstance results in progressive tax rates and a larger state. Both these policies are the logical result of the ‘truths’ they rest on. Based on this you could argue that politics has never occupied truth in the way that the phrase ‘post-truth politics’ implies, because the ‘truth’ has never been.
Disregarding the problematic assumptions that the phrase rests on, like the previous existence of some undefined yet definitive ‘truth’, ‘post-truth politics’ could be read in a looser, more forgiving way. Perhaps the people who use it simply mean to imply that politics is less about the issues than it used to be. That there has been a shift away from the importance of policy and towards less substantive things like personality. Less focused on the moral, and more on the aesthetic.
But again, this assumption rests on other assumptions about reality! If people from across the political spectrum were saying this then fine, we should probably take it seriously. But the assertion of a decline in the quality of our politics is something said by the side who’s way politics is not going. Of course american ‘liberals’ think that politics is going downhill, the assumptions their positions rest on are being ignored. And obviously the people whose reality is being reiterated by the president of the US disagree, and would tell you that the past was not a period of truthful politics, but pre-truth.
Any piece of language, especially political language, is absolutely rife with social connotations and inferences about ‘the other side’, but can also be quite revealing about the people who use it most.
For example, the phrase ‘post-truth politics’ implies that the person saying it believes there was a time previously that could be considered ‘truth-politics’, by use of the prefix ‘post’, to come after. But what point in time could really be considered ‘truth politics’? By virtue of its own implications, the phrase is backwards looking in this way. It defines the present not by what is actually here, but by what is absent- truth. Defining things by what they aren’t is a dangerous game to play. Any position you take that rests upon that definition is on shaky ground, the sheer vagueness creates a vacuum, into which other ideas and positions can easily expand.
When movements contain the prefix ‘post’ they usually get that label even later on in time. Back in the day, any artist doing something different to what was called modernism after the heyday of modernism was technically ‘post-modern’, but not all artists working in the post-modern period would go on to be called ‘postmodern’, as it turned out it was the artists whose work could be viewed most clearly as a response to modernism who were later, retroactively, put into the category of ‘post-modernism’. So let's apply this usage to politics.
Since we’ve deduced that the ‘truth’ in ‘post-truth’ can’t objectively mean the actual truth, because in politics no one can agree on what that is, we’ll have to take it to mean ‘established’ or ‘traditional’, the way things used to be. Applying the linguistic logic of previous ‘post-somethings’: ‘post-truth politics’ could be the label we give to any form of politics that is most obviously a response to the old kind of politics, which Trump definitely is.
So we are living in an era of post-truth politics! Or, at least, post-truth politics exists in this era alongside other forms of politics, forms of politics that are ‘post-truth’; in the way that Oasis are ‘post-punk’, or Jordan Peterson is ‘postmodernist’. They came after, but the link is opaque.
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