Post-truth politics and the social sciences

In late 2015, the majority of the world’s governments agreed to commenced implementation in 2016 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development¹ and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.² No one was to be left behind. The transition to less carbon-intensive economies was to be accelerated. The momentum, we were told, was unstoppable. Of course, no one involved in negotiating the 2030 Agenda or the Paris Agreement would have expected them to proceed without any kind of conflict or implementation failure. Optimism should not be confused with naivety.

Still, in the short term at least, 2016 will not be known as the year in which optimism bloomed. It will be known as the year in which the blatant dishonesty and cynicism of political campaigns associated with Brexit, the US presidential election and quite a few others led Oxford Dictionaries to declare ‘post-truth’ the word of the year.

There is, as yet, very little scholarly literature that engages directly with the concept of post-truth politics. In popular use, it is associated with an increasing disregard for factual evidence in political discourse. What matters is not whether the claims of politicians can be proven true. What matters is whether those listening to those claims would like them to be true – truth being judged not by evidence but by consistency with listeners’ existing beliefs and values. Politicians may long have been among the least trusted members of our societies, but the idea of post-truth politics suggests there is an important qualitative difference between the post-truth politician and the spin doctors of yore. The post-truth politician does not simply pick-and-chose among relevant facts, offer questionable interpretations or avoid inconvenient questions. The post-truth politician manufactures his or her own facts. The post-truth politician asserts whatever they believe to be in their own interest and they continue to press those same claims, regardless of the evidence amassed against them.

I will state from the onset that I am troubled by the banality of the term ‘post-truth’ – a term evocative of avant-garde and mostly benign intellectual and aesthetic movements. What we have seen in so-called post-truth politicians is an authoritarian impulse that promises to be both reckless and destructive – an impulse all too comfortable with the deployment of propaganda, vilification and intimidation.

Post-truth politics could hardly stand in more direct opposition to the values most of us bring to scholarship, research and advocacy. How then, are social scientists to respond?

Truth and solidarity

The most obvious response to post-truth politics is to counter misinformation with facts. Either we attempt to counter misinformation, after all, or we capitulate – we allow unsubstantiated assertions and manufactured facts to drive public policy and decision-making.

The manner in which we might best counter misinformation/propaganda, however, is less obvious. When factual claims are judged according to their emotional and ideological consistency, we cannot expect that lobbing more factual claims into the public domain will necessarily challenge anyone’s beliefs. How many headlines and social media posts have we seen screaming that someone-or-other has dropped a ‘truth bomb’ or ‘destroyed’ an argument? Outcomes of the Brexit and US presidential elections suggest ‘truth bombs’ do little more than make those already sympathetic to their content feel a momentary sense of triumph.

There is plenty of evidence, moreover, that presenting people with evidence contrary to strongly held beliefs may act, counter-intuitively, to reinforce those beliefs (see for example, McCright et al. 2016). The presentation of contrary evidence may reinforce people’s view that particular claims-makers cannot be trusted, that experts will almost inevitably present different advice tomorrow to the advice they presented yesterday, that no one really knows for sure or that risks are exaggerated. There are many ways to explain away contrary evidence without questioning existing beliefs.

Post-truth politics exploits this contradiction by disputing the independence and objectivity of scientists and scholars. We are dismissed as ‘elites’ – as one more cog in the establishment machine that allegedly suppresses free speech and imposes political correctness. Post-truth politics contests our right to act as public intellectuals. Our contributions to the public sphere are decried as undemocratic – our words silencing the voices of ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’, ‘real’ people.

This line of argumentation is, of course, logically flawed. It does not follow from any status ascribed to intellectuals that other voices are necessarily silenced. The argument is put in this way to delegitimize our role in public discourse and to avoid engaging with the validity of any facts we present or interpretations we offer. More insidious, however, is the marginalization of those not even named in this argument, for who is ‘ordinary’ in the world of post-truth politics except those who are not ‘other’ – those not wrapped in the wrong coloured skin? Those who do not speak with the wrong accent or worship the wrong deity? Those who do not think the wrong thoughts or support the wrong ideologue?

‘Ordinary’ is a powerfully exclusive word.

Misinformation must also be countered, therefore, with solidarity. Facts may be the first casualty of post-truth politics but – to the extent post-truth propagandists enjoy electoral success – material consequences for people and ecosystems follow closely behind. It makes absolute sense, in this context, that many of our colleagues, in both the social and natural sciences, see increased involvement in grassroots activism as a logical and necessary response to a Trump presidency.

Comprehending ‘post-truth’

Regardless of how social scientists respond to so-called post-truth politics (grassroots activism being just one option), their responses ought to be underpinned by systematic attempts to understand the political dynamics at play. It is no great surprise that in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit and US presidential votes, we saw an outpouring of opinion pieces on why elections turned the way they did, the effectiveness of various political strategies, the roles of conventional and social media and so on. We can expect to see a similar outpouring of more considered analysis in the peer-reviewed literature in due course.

Much debate following the Brexit and US presidential elections, to date, has focused on the significance of racism and xenophobia relative to disillusionment with politics-as-usual among those negatively impacted by deindustrialization and globalization and with other political phenomena such a climate change denial. Questions have been asked about the role of social media echo chambers, fake news sites and partisan conventional media sources in reinforcing racism, disillusionment and denial. So too have questions been asked about the influence and merits of differing legal and institutional frameworks for the conduct of elections (for example, voluntary versus compulsory voting, first-past-the-post versus preferential voting, majority rule versus proportional representation, etc.).

While I am not going to review these debates in any detail here, I will comment on the risk of oversimplification. A number of commentators have argued the case for attributing more causal power to one factor than to others. Journalist Naomi Klein (2016), for example, argues it was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that laid the foundations for a Trump win – that a campaign based on arguing for ‘more of the same’ was never going to assuage growing anxiety over the loss of jobs, security, status and dignity inflicted by neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, globalization and austerity.

It is true enough that economic restructuring has generated inequalities and anxieties that post-truth politicians exploit by scapegoating minority groups, foreign workers, etc. (while simultaneously blaming their political opponents and other ‘elites’ for allowing it all to happen). It does not follow though that racism and xenophobia are themselves a product of trade liberalization and labour market restructuring. We might as well argue that calls to undermine women’s reproductive rights are a product of labour market restructuring and explain away both racism and misogyny with romanticized narratives of working-class rebellion. It really ought to go without saying that the relationships between social and economic change, political discourse and voting patterns are rather more complex.

Neoliberalism is too frequently invoked in both the scholarly and popular literatures with little theoretical or analytical specificity – a convenient catch-all category for any policy, decision or institution that engages market mechanisms (or which the observer simply dislikes). If we want to understand the connections between neoliberal policy and recent election outcomes, we need to avoid this conceptual looseness and draw on what is now decades of research on the evolution and impacts of neoliberal models of governance. And we should not assume a priori that the outcomes of neoliberalization are universally negative.³

We would do equally well to question the apparent novelty of post-truth politics. Usage of the term ‘post-truth’ may well be novel, but there is nothing novel about the authoritarian impulse implicit in such open contempt for truthfulness. This contempt is neither novel in time nor unique to the UK and USA. Propaganda has long been a favoured tool among demagogues and colonialists – misleading information and dehumanizing rhetoric the legitimating force behind dispossession, repression, coercion and violence.

Questioning the novelty of post-truth politics allows us to draw, again, on decades of research in order to understand the circumstances that have led to recent electoral outcomes, to project the likely consequences of major shifts in public policy, and to inform countervailing strategies. From detailed research on the organization of climate denial (Dunlap and McCright 2015) to the mobilization of environmental justice movements (Ottinger and Sarantschin 2016; Mele 2016; Sbicca and Myers 2016), there is an enormous body of knowledge on which to draw.⁴ As I have argued previously in this journal:

environmental injustices are acts of violence perpetrated through the chemical, physical and biological pathways of human metabolism and ecosystem processes. They are acts of violence perpetrated on the bodies, minds and livelihoods of their victims. (Lockie 2016, 234)

Environmental injustices are acts of violence perpetrated disproportionately on people of colour, indigenous peoples, migrants and others marginalized in the rhetoric of post-truth politics. They are acts of violence that will intensify if environmental regulations and regulatory capacities are dismantled. And, to the extent that environmental and health monitoring is compromised, they are acts of violence that will be all the more easily dismissed and denied.⁵ Again, the misinformation/propaganda of post-truth politics must be countered both with facts and with solidarity.

The importance of ignorance and uncertainty

Environmental justice movements demonstrate very clearly the importance of not always taking facts at face value. When the facts produced by government health and environmental agencies contradicted the lived experience of those exposed to toxic threats, coalitions of activists and scholars emerged to produce new facts, test interpretations and debate responses – and to do so in ways that were systematic, multidisciplinary and participatory (Brown 1997). Contesting the unfounded confidence of public agencies and addressing uncertainty produced better science.

Organized climate denial has generated considerable anxiety among sociologists, however, over the potentially negative impacts of investigating the ways in which scientific knowledge and environmental claims-making are socially constructed (Murphy 2016). Might not climate denialists seize on arguments that scientific knowledge is assembled through networks, institutions and conventions and use these arguments to question the validity of climate knowledge? Certainly, controversies like the ‘climategate’ furore over email exchanges between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia illustrate the potential of climate denialists to seize on (and distort) the influence of scientific networks on climate knowledge. Even here though, what we see from organized climate denial is a movement less prone to the prosecution of constructivist epistemologies than it is to representing itself as the guardian of scientific method – the reasoned and anti-elitist voice of scepticism and doubt.

Science is, of course, built on principles of scepticism and doubt. Facts are always considered provisional and incomplete. They are never anything better than the best facts we have subject to more evidence, better explanations and changing circumstances. We are always faced with residual domains of ignorance and uncertainty. While the power of science lies, in large part, on its claim to generate universal knowledge, researchers must always be clear about the limits of their work and the circumstances in which it might be considered generalizable. This is no less true of climate science than it is of any other domain of inquiry in the natural or social sciences.

Social sciences must deal with an extra dimension of uncertainty arising from the fluidity and self-reflexivity of the social realm. This is not because the truth can be anything any particular person or institution might want it to be but because societies do not exist in a steady state. People move. Values and aspirations change. Political alliances dissolve. New alliances emerge. And people are capable of reflecting on the meaning and significance of social facts and changing their behaviour accordingly.

Post-truth thrives on polarization and exaggerated difference. White versus black. Us against them. True versus false. Where there is doubt, in this world, there must be falsehood. But no branch of science is likely to thrive by hiding uncertainty for fear of the mutant positivism of organized climate denial – let alone the even less evidentially based world of post-truth propagandists. Indeed, it is by confronting ignorance and uncertainty, Gross (2014) contends, that we most fully open ourselves to learning and the resolution of seemingly intractable problems.

Democratizing knowledge

A critical feature of neoliberal rationalities of governance (or ways of thinking about the practice of governance) is the recasting of economic management as the depoliticized application of technical economic expertise at a variety of scales (Lockie 2014). Responsibility for governance, according to this rationality, is not devolved solely from governments to markets but from elected officials to technocrats, and from institutions to individuals. Trade is not de-regulated so much as it is re-regulated according to different sets of rules. Welfare state protections are reformed with the intent of enabling people’s reconstruction as responsible self-governing subjects. Market mechanisms are used in novel ways to allocate public resources more efficiently by developing and exploiting citizens’ capacities as entrepreneurial individuals. This, at least, is the theory.

The application of neoliberal rationalities through all domains of governance is incomplete and marked by numerous inconsistencies. Nonetheless, if we think of the period from the mid-1980s to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 as the heyday of neoliberalism, we see a parallel trend toward what has euphemistically been called ‘politics by focus group’. As political parties on the nominally left and right embraced trade liberalization and devolved regulatory responsibilities to technocrats, they simultaneously struggled to maintain unique identities and demonstrate compelling cases for (re)election. The so-called ‘end of ideology’ was thus accompanied by sentiment management (telling people what the focus groups suggested they wanted to hear) and the manufacture of moral panics over crime, drug abuse, welfare fraud (even when these were, in fact, in decline) and the irresponsible citizens and non-citizens allegedly responsible for them.

I am, of course, oversimplifying a vastly more complex and discontinuous process of political and economic change. The key point is that through this period we faced fundamental contradictions between governments telling people they ought to take responsibility for their own destinies, punitive interventions in the lives of those struggling to do so, the delegation of key economic decision-making capacities to technocrats and the constant spin doctoring of sentiment management. The step from here to the outright lies of post-truth politics might be considered a small one, although at least one crucial difference is that while ‘governance by focus group’ tended to gravitate toward the political middle ground, post-truth politics clearly gravitates to the extremes.

Promoting an altogether different political trajectory will depend on, among other things, a radical democratization of the knowledge on which decisions are made – a democratization that spreads across the social, economic and environmental domains.

Some will ask, quite reasonably, whether a democratization of knowledge assumes that the person screaming non-facts at them has the right to keep screaming? No, it does not. While the democratization of knowledge might mean a number of things I would argue that, at minimum, it requires a commitment to shared understanding and dialogue. Respect for all participants and the experiences they bring to dialogue presupposes parallel respect for expertise and the implications of evidence. Democratizing knowledge is not a kind of alchemy for turning opinions into facts.

There are numerous models of participatory research, policy development, environmental management, etc. that could be mentioned here (including those developed in the context of environmental justice). But democratization does not rest solely on participatory methods. ​Burawoy’s (2005) concept of ‘public sociology’ is relevant here – the idea that sociology can and ought to be brought into conversation with a variety of publics. Such a conversation, according to Burawoy, is based on dialogue and negotiation to establish shared goals and agendas as opposed to the application of any particular method or theory. Public sociology is thus something quite different to policy or applied sociology in the service of government or other clients (as important as these might be). At the same time, there is nothing in the idea of public sociology that is antagonistic to the systematic professional practice of data collection, analysis and theory-building. The key questions are: who is knowledge to be produced for and who gets to make that decision?

While the democratization of knowledge will take different forms in different settings, the presupposition of dialogue – of attempting in good faith to build common understanding – challenges the contrived epistemic and social polarizations of post-truth/propaganda.

Conclusion

If 2016 is to be known as the year in which the world turned a corner on sustainable development and the mitigation of climate change, it will require more than blind optimism or luck. Neither the 2030 Agenda nor the Paris Agreement have, as yet, been undermined. The electoral success enjoyed by post-truth/propagandists in some jurisdictions is not universal. It is not uncontested. And it is not even something we could describe as poorly understood. While there are many debates to be had on the causes and implications of recent events, we have numerous methodological and theoretical tools in the social sciences to comprehend authoritarianism and it is incumbent on us to deploy them. I, for one, am encouraged by the commitment of colleagues across the sciences to building cross-sectoral coalitions and to democratizing their own work as they interrogate relationships between social, political and environmental change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.​

Notes

1. See United Nations (2015a) and other resources available at sustainabledevelopment.un.org.

2. See United Nations (2015b) and other resources available at unfcc.int.

3. Environmental policies that utilize market mechanisms, for example, such as emissions trading, payment for ecosystem services, eco-standards, etc. can be highly effective in the right circumstances (Lockie 2013).

4. As this essay is published in the Environmental Sociology journal, I have used overtly environmental examples. It would be just as relevant, however, to draw on research regarding use of the criminal justice system to govern minorities, poverty and political dissent.

5. The environmental justice movement both demonstrates that there is nothing new about denying the violence wrought on people’s bodies through exposure to environmental threats and that strategies to generate and share knowledge of these threats are needed to contest such denial. In order to map exposures to toxicants and other environmental threats, environmental justice advocates and scholars have long collaborated using models of popular epidemiology (Brown 1997) and are now exploring the opportunities afforded by new technologies including ‘big data’ to continue challenging what Mah (2016) refers to as ‘toxic blind spots’.