What's New about "Post-Factual" Politics?

• In Event: Truth, Post-Truth, and Popular Truth

Abstract

It is often said that the United States is now operating in an era of “post-truth” or “post-factual” politics. But the frequency with which that language is used is not matched by any clear and precise sense of its meaning. In the first part of this paper, I propose that post-factual democratic politics is best understood as a cultural condition characterized by the prevalence among ordinary citizens of certain attitudes towards (conflicting) claims about politically relevant empirical matters. In part II, I identify and carefully distinguish from one another four such attitudes that, when they are widespread (in some combination), constitute a post-factual political culture, and I argue that one of these attitudes – a generalized distrust of sources that I call epistemic post-factualism – has been unduly neglected in recent commentary, which could lead us to misunderstand the phenomenon of post-factual politics and the challenge it poses for democracy.

In part III, I turn to the question of whether post-factual politics is as new and distinctive a phenomenon as its name would suggest and commentators appear to suppose. I propose that the distinctiveness of post-factual politics lies in the ways that recent developments in information technology and media (including news, entertainment, and social media) have amplified certain perennial features of democratic politics. This suggests that post-factual politics is different only in degree, not in kind, from its predecessors. In particular, I argue that both epistemic post-factualism and the unconscious post-factualism of citizens who put their faith in unreliable sources are really just contemporary manifestations of the timeless problems of bias, insincerity, and (dis)trust that are endemic to democratic politics. But, in part IV, I acknowledge and analyze the radical turn that these two attitudes appear to have taken in recent years, as hitherto unperceived values and interests (and associated epistemological unreliability) are attributed to sources based solely on the politically relevant empirical claims they make. This radical turn is the most novel and disturbing aspect of post-factual politics. And the proper response to it, I conclude in part V, will depend significantly on the extent to which it is a radicalization of epistemic as distinct from unconscious post-factualism. Hence the importance of exploring, both conceptually and empirically, the precise nature of the constellation of post-factual political attitudes in our midst.

Author

• Ian R. MacMullen, Duke University