Doom. Doom. Doom. The truth is gone, the lines are blurred, the lies prevail. Politics may never recover. So sayeth the crowd of commentators who have declared that we now live in a “post-truth” world—a state of politics and discourse in which people and politicians stake out claims grounded in their own subjective versions of facts, ignoring any semblance of objective reality.
The post-truth world theory hasn’t materialized out of thin air. In the United States, Donald Trump, a major party’s presidential candidate, has made and recycled countless false statements ranging from the declaration that his wild tax plan would produce a surplus to the assertion that Barack Obama is the sole founder of the Islamic State to the rumor that Obama was born in Kenya. Faced with incontrovertible evidence contradicting those statements, he has doubled down on them, questioning the veracity of the so-called “objective facts.” His claims have been shameless and perturbing. Unfortunately, such shenanigans haven’t just been limited to American politics.
In the United Kingdom, during the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, pro-leave advocates repeatedly claimed that EU membership cost the UK 350 million pounds/week and that a vote to leave the union would lead to that amount of money instead being spent on the UK’s national healthcare system. The claim was roundly debunked, but that didn’t stop it from being splayed over pro-leave banners and constantly repeated by prominent “Brexiteers.”
Certainly, the world of 2016 provides ample opportunities for such “post-Truthism” to rise in politics. In academia and research, so called “experts” regularly contradict each other, as evidenced by the seemingly benign debate about the actual health benefits of milk. Those contradictions make it seem that the truth of any given statement is up for debate. Meanwhile, people confine themselves inside of social media echo chambers where they are regularly exposed to a narrow band of supportive opinions and diluted facts, decreasing their ability to accurately evaluate truth. On top of all that, the rise of globalization has heightened xenophobic and racist attitudes across the developed world, prompting people to rely on “truth-y” feels-right facts to back up their thinly veiled prejudices.
Post-truth politics, though, is nothing new. Ever since the days of Julius Caesar, politicians have played games with semi-truthful rhetoric in order to influence their electorates. During the election of 1800, New Englanders frantically hid their bibles in their wells under the false guise from John Adams’ supporters that the deist Thomas Jefferson would seize all religious books. Even in 1960, President Kennedy had to deal with baseless claims by Republicans that he would be subservient to the Pope.
The political lies of today are not new, nor or they more egregious than those of the past. They have simply become magnified in a digital age where they are easily re-shared. In fact, perhaps “anti-Truthism” in 2016 has ironically contributed to a more honest depiction of the state of American politics. It has exposed a nest of lingering racist, sexist and xenophobic attitudes that lie beneath a web of shoddily constructed claims.
Claims that we live in a post-truth world today are overblown and not historically grounded. Whether it is 1800, or 2016, or looking four years down the line at 2020, voters must always be able to process a broad range of claims and judge the validity of each on its own merits. Politicians can always lie, but they cannot define the truth.
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