International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2018

Shit, piss, fart, puke, burp, excrete, etc., repeat. This could easily be part of an art installation symbolizing a cultural turn to the base and vulgar, but it is not. This simply represents a list of bodily functions that have been increasingly hidden away, controlled and soothed through euphemism. It is illustrative of a ‘civilizing process’ witnessed since Medieval times, a process driven by value being placed on human sociality and a defining of self through our interactional relations with others. Indeed modern forms of democracy can be considered, in part, the result of us placing greater trust in the collective will, an acknowledgement that our own future is intricately tied to that of our fellow citizen. However, in this conceptual article, we argue that contemporary notions of democracy, ontologically premised on the atomized individual as the legitimate social agent are themselves being destabilized. This disruption is due to a shift in our conception of ‘self’ that is both corroding the core pillars of our civilizing process and altering the nature of our engagement with democratic politics. In essence a contemporary self that is characterized as having narcissistic tendencies desensitizes our sociality and thus thresholds of embarrassment and shame rise. Consequently, we see our democratic rights but not our responsibilities; we engage in democracy primarily to assert and validate our way of living, our beliefs, our existence. Also, to corrupt further an oft-misused quote from Sartre, ‘to hell with other people’. Such populist uses (perhaps misuses) of democratic processes undermine the very principles on which democracy is based: fairness, equality and the dignity of all human beings. ‘Trumpism’ and other forms of populist political outpourings that are marked by disinhibition, vulgarity and personal truths are the result of these cultural shifts. This article explores this cultural turn situating narcissistic individualism at the heart of the post-truth phenomenon.

This article provides a theoretical and philosophical investigation for the discursive construction of truth based predominantly upon the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe but also on insights drawn from other scholars. As a theoretical article the aim is to contribute to the understanding of post-truth as a recent phenomenon and elaborate on several dimensions and aspects of it by employing a conceptual analysis enriched with several references from recent literature and published articles. Social truth as a social construction is a discourse with a privileged signification power over masses. Therefore the conditions for the construction of the discourse of truth are a focal topic for analysis. On the other hand, the ‘post-truth’ concept, which invaded in political life during 2016, puts into contestation several constitutive and structural elements of truth and consequently democracy as it currently functions in modern liberal states. The article is divided into three sections: (1) The first section provides a theoretical analysis on what is truth and how it is constructed as a discourse in a society; (2) the second section discusses the concept of post-truth and the possible reasons for the emergence of post-truth narratives in contemporary political communication and (3) the last section delineates the impact that post-truth narratives have on the political level, the institutional level and the social level.

Most of what is considered post-truth politics refers to known features of politics and political propaganda. These are old phenomena boosted by technology, and in particular by social media. To examine the background and genesis of post-truth politics, this article integrates in the analysis the impact of online media and the relativism of postmodernity, in which the truth is always a discursive construction, never a discovery. It also examines populism in the light of this approach. The analysis concludes that all these elements play a definite role in post-truth politics and that the so-called post-truth era is not simply a by-product of populism; relativism, the media and the uses of technology also play an important role.

The charge of political spin, as a biased and self-advantaging form of public communication practiced by media and political actors, is thought to have developed alongside 24/7 media during the 1990s. More recently, the critique of the political arts of persuasion has deepened with the more serious charge of post-truth. Here, facts are deemed as malleable and subservient to beliefs, and indeed, can be strategically deployed to serve beliefs. This article draws on data from in-depth interviews with media and political actors and the analysis of key documents to examine the charge of political spin as applied to government communications, taking the United Kingdom since 1997 as a case study. It considers whether post-truth is just another word for the same phenomenon or a radical departure from it. Both charges can be seen as outcomes of the increasing mediatization of politics whereby complex sociopolitical issues are simplified into narratives and slogans, election campaigning becomes an integral part of the everyday process of governing and political imperatives challenge the scope within government for the scrutiny of verifiable facts and truths. However, the stance taken by these charges in relation to evidence, and their acknowledgement of the role of accountability in public life and as part of the democratic process, are radically different. The article concludes that, far from being another word for ‘political spin’, ‘post-truth’ is a radical departure from it that signals a serious development: the crisis in public communication characterized by a growing public distrust in government and the democratic process.

As other authors in this collection have stated, post-truth came into common parlance as commentators analysed and reflected on election campaigns and their results: the suggestion being that emotions and beliefs had become more powerful than reasoned, fact-based argumentation. Given that most campaigns present their own redacted perspective of reality into an environment containing multiple, contested alternative interpretations, the association between the most contested variant of a campaign, a political contest and post-truth is unsurprising. All campaigns contain elements of post-truth, appeals to emotions that build bridges between that which is sold and the identity of the consumer. Campaigns may encourage people to think but also to feel, and as such campaign strategies chime with understandings of human engagement and the levels of cognitive attention given, with many decisions being gut responses rather than being carefully considered. Our research focuses on two UK contests: the 2016 referendum on membership of the EU and the subsequent 2017 snap general election. Interviews among older voters who voted to leave the EU and younger voters who supported Corbyn-led Labour provide insights into how what might be seen as peripheral aspects influenced voting decisions. The data we suggest highlight challenges for democratic institutions as populist voices present themselves as change agents to win support from voters dissatisfied with consensus politics. Mainstream politicians meanwhile are mistrusted while the arguments of outsiders who appear authentic are given credence. Such observations go to the heart of issues facing democracy and place debates surrounding post-truth as core to those challenges. This article offers insights into how voter choices reveal cognitive processes that explain the link between campaign communication, belief formation and voter choice-making, all of which combine to threaten democracy.

In 2016, post-truth was named word of the year. Since then a handful of texts have sought to further describe and explore the notion, moving beyond the initial definition given by the Oxford Dictionary. This article rejects the term ‘post-truth’, in favour of propaganda, since post-truth tends to be utilized as an evaluative term of contemporary political public discourse, as articulated by specific politicians, predominantly through social media. Taking the field of information management as its starting point, our approach underlines the diachronic character of persuasion efforts through information management, understood as propaganda in the public sphere. As a notion, propaganda, in contrast to post-truth, encapsulates both the diachronic character of information management in the public sphere and the ground-breaking transformation of the process of personal opinion expression, initially described by the spiral of silence model, through the emergence of new interactive media.

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