The New 'Post-Truth' Politics

On a recent visit to Prague, I came across the following passage from one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, the modernist Franz Kafka, worth quoting in full: 

"The war has led us into a labyrinth of distorting mirrors. We stumble from one fictitious vision to another, bewildered victims of false prophets and charlatans who, with their cheap recipes for happiness, merely cover our eyes and ears, so that, because of the mirrors, we fall from one dungeon to another, like through open trapdoors". 

Whilst writing in a different era, in an entirely different culture and context, and obviously slightly polemic, Kafka's words seem strangely to resonate with a growing trend in politics today - what has recently been labelled 'post-truth' politics. 

Brexit is widely agreed to have ushered in a new age in British politics. Yet it seems more appropriate to regard it as symptomatic of a new period which began earlier, with the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2008/9, which ended what economists call the ‘Great Moderation’ – a era of steady growth and low inflation beginning in the early 1990s.

What we have seen since is a widespread growth of antipathy towards the greater ‘powers that be’ within the global economy – pejoratively termed ‘the establishment’ - largely due to the perception that those whose actions led to a banking crisis and the largest recession since the 1930s have hardly suffered, notably bankers, financiers and politicians, whilst more widely there has been a long-term stagnation of living standards across the Western world. They are certainly right to feel aggrieved.

Yet anyone who has studied or is studying any sort political history knows that such times of crisis and disillusionment lead people away from the political centre, leading to a demand for change which brings more extreme views into the fold. This is the politics of feeling, where the pursuit of consensus and agreement is abandoned in favour of reinforcing deeper fears and prejudice - adequately captured by Kafka’s quote (an individual well-acquainted with conflict, both in his surroundings and internally).

The politics of populism then, by appealing to feelings and fears, prejudice and division, has abandoned a serious debate and approach to policymaking in favour of what Professor Michael Dougan might call ‘dishonesty on an industrial scale’. This is not to say that politicians have never been economical with the truth, to put it mildly, but this is vastly different. Instead, the truth, or some sort of attempt to achieve an intellectual settlement or consensus, has become of secondary importance. From a media obsession with balance and false dichotomy, to the grandiose lies and fantasies of the likes of Donald Trump (who has claimed President Obama was notborn in the USA, and even has links to ISIS) and the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign, which have been further amplified by the social media revolution and the algorithms of newsfeeds which have the unintended consequence of shielding individuals from opposing views. The zeitgeist of post-truth politics in the UK was signalled by the outgoing Justice Secretary Michael Gove, who made the audacious claim that “the people have had enough of experts”.

The sad reality is that, in the serious business of politics, dealing with people’s well being, it pays to be an outrageous, headline-grabbing ‘false prophet’ or ‘charlatan’, rather than making any attempt to be insightful, let alone to appreciate the nuance and contours of public policy issues. We are all losing out from this, whether we realise it or not.

There is an underlying problem with how we carry out and frame debates, in this country at least – from watching student debates to interviews and debates on mainstream media. This is, ironically, admitting how little grasp we have on any objective truth, and the partiality of any truth invoked in argument. As Peter Wehner has pointed out, George Orwell was remarkably candid and modest in his own views in his Homaga to Catalonia (1938) when he confessed that all of us experience “only one corner of events”. This is a sound example to the current political climate. It was the rhetoric and ideology that drove an austerity agenda that was premature, and it was rhetoric, nationalism and fear that has plunged Britain into a crisis set to last at least a decade.

Whilst History shows that this state of affairs has never persisted permanently, perhaps a comfort at this stage, the populism and deceit of the Brexit campaign shows this type of politics can have real effects on the political agenda, and in a hugely detrimental fashion to anyone genuinely interested in conducting genuine, modest and open-minded debate on all sides. This cannot change soon enough.