6 - Post-Truth Discourses and their Limits: A Democratic Crisis?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Western democracies are currently said to be under siege. ‘Fake news’ is flooding social media, ‘alternative facts’ are circulated by political elites and ‘post-truth'sentiments roam throughout society. What was once deemed the normative foundations of democracy and freedom, namely reason and truth, have supposedly been shattered, leaving societies in a perpetual state of crisis. The French President Emmanuel Macron captured this dystopian zeitgeist in the spring of 2018 when he appeared before the joint houses of the US Congress:’ Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions. The corruption of information is an attempt to corrode the very spirit of our democracies.’

Macron has not been alone in lamenting the contemporary devaluation of truth in Western liberal democracies. In recent years, a seemingly endless line of commentators from the academic, political, journalistic and commercial realms have argued that fake news and the post-truth era threaten democratic societies in substantive ways. Indeed, news outlets have overflowed with articles and op-eds dedicated to the post-truth condition, while a steady flow of books have sought to pinpoint its origins and potential resolution. This range of post-truth voices has not emerged as a homogeneous or singular movement, agreeing on how and why democracy has ended up in its current predicament. Different fields and perspectives have blamed different factors for causing the crisis: from technology and media over politicians and institutions to the democratic masses themselves. Still, across these post-truth discourses, we find a series of more or less unifying traits. For one thing, there is widespread agreement that we are facing grave societal dangers. The pillars of liberal democracies are supposedly crumbling and its structures are buckling under pressure. The rational spirit of democracy is said to be under attack or even dying. Post-truth discourses indeed seem to share a set of underlying normative premises about what democracy is and ought to be – namely a political system bound up with truth, reason and rationality. From this perspective, a decline of truth is necessarily equal to a decline of democracy itself.

This chapter presents the findings of a comprehensive investigation of contemporary post-truth discourses and their democratic underpinnings.