Populism, citizenship, and post-truth politics

ABSTRACT

This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 22nd meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism at Southampton, England. The paper presents a critical realist take on the right-wing populism that has surfaced in a number of our countries. That means in the first place employing what has been called SAC, which is an acronym for structure, agency, and culture. Reference to all three are necessary to account for current populism. The paper will argue further that critical realism helps us in still another way. The right-wing populism we see is bound up with a crisis of truth that raises fundamental questions about our moral responsibilities as democratic citizens. This paper will address these responsibilities as well, which relate to the agentic element of SAC. In that connection, this paper will comment on how critical realism uniquely helps us with truth.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-truth
• populism
• democracy
• ethics of belief
• knowledge class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Douglas Porpora, a professor of sociology in the Department of Communication at Drexel University, is the current president of the International Association for Critical Realism. His work alternates between the political and philosophical or, as here, is both. His most recent book is Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach (Cambridge, 2015).