Since Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene more than a decade ago, lying in politics has become ever more shameless. It’s the “post-truth politics” era, apparently. Oxford Dictionaries, which crowned “post-truth” the word of the year when Trump first took up residence at the White House, noted that “it describes not just particular assertions, but a general characteristic of our age”. The Economist wrote at the time:
“His brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power … [Post-truth politics] picks out the heart of what is new: that truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance. Feelings, not facts, are what matter in this sort of campaigning.”
Yet if “post-truth” is characterised by emotional appeals and relegating facts to the sidelines, it’s not clear that politics has fundamentally changed at all.
On a 2008 autumn night in Grant Park, Chicago, Democratic president-elect Barack Obama, promoted as an articulate Harvard Law graduate with a firm grasp on reality, addressed an enormous crowd. The backdrop was an emerging economic depression: millions of workers were being sacked, more than 3 million homes had been foreclosed in the previous 24 months, the financial system had collapsed, and tent cities of the newly homeless were springing up on the edges of cities across America.
“The true strength of our nation comes … from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity”, Obama promised. “This is our time … to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one.” His optimistic gesture was one of the finest moments for the politics of feeling, the culmination of a campaign run on vague notions of hope, change and the slogan “Yes, we can”—appropriated from the mass struggle of undocumented migrants, millions of whom he would go on to deport as president.
Yet Obama’s oration wasn’t considered “post-truth”, because the sentiments, similarly articulated by most political leaders in the democratic West for the last century, were underpinned by unchallenged liberal certainties: that under capitalism, anyone can “make it”, that improvement is the child of hard work, that all individual interests can be accommodated within the national interest.
“Dream, believe, achieve.” Vacuous aphorisms of this variety are the bedrock of capitalist politics. They aren’t facts or truths, but expressions of an idealised liberal-democratic world whose promises have never been realised. Yet they endure. So why only now are we said to live in a world of post-truth politics? Probably because the empty pledges of progress and prosperity have given way to messages and tones that reflect an era of social decline and political decay at odds with the vision of the world that liberals remain desperate to believe.
Marketing the truth
Many have pointed out that the last four decades of rapacious free trade and economic and political crises sowed the seeds of this post-truth age. Soaring inequality, greater economic precariousness, more and more people expected to fend for themselves against the forces of globalised capitalism. So British commentator George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that “Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975”, when Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership of the Conservative Party and got everyone reading, and later implementing, the work of Frederick Hayek.
This focus on a purportedly neoliberal economy in producing the “Trumpian moment” (and the broader rise of the far right) misses the universal aspect of this so-called post-truth era. Capitalism is based on theft, and all pro-capitalist politics—far right, conservative, libertarian, liberal, even social democratic—exists to cover up or justify it. Pro-capitalist politics is fundamentally about deceiving people into thinking the system is either fair or natural, when it is neither.
Nearly 200 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first wrote of the stripping away of humanity that came with capitalism’s emergence from the old medieval order:
“The capitalist class, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has … left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’ … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.”
Pre-capitalist feudal markets, with guilds and heavy regulation, often operated as limited sites of “justice”: prices and incomes were reasonably assured, all things being equal, and fixed to create economic stability for the people doing the work. Capitalism removed these certainties, shattering the regulated social and economic order. As it did, the market became a site of “truth”: prices increasingly reflected the true costs of production, which were falling. Falling costs facilitated trade and wealth accumulation among a small section of the population at a disturbing pace and on an unlimited scale. But at the same time, they ravaged the labouring classes, whose relationship with the world was now mediated through the capitalist market.
Much later, Michel Foucault, in a series of lectures at Collège de France, noted that this capitalist turn had profound political implications—the market itself became the adjudicator of governments: “The market determines that a good government is no longer quite simply one that is just. The market now means that to be a good government, government has to function according to truth”. But the market’s truth is nothing more than one of capitalism’s adages: every man has his price, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so on. There is now no humanity, no solidarity, no intimacy in truth.
We can recognise the continuity from those early years of capitalism. Governments and representative institutions today are characterised less by political discussion than by managerial procedures focused on economic efficiency. Policies themselves are “tested” not by their social value but by the Treasury, which usually produces a “business case” for whatever it is.
Yet if the truth of government lies in the judgment of capitalist markets, then the latter’s crises expose the deceptions of official politics. In “normal” times, people don’t buy all of the system’s “truths”—for example, not many people would look at Gina Rinehart and think she must have worked really hard for all that money. In extraordinary times, when events like the 2008 financial crisis occur, reality is laid bare, and politics is forced to respond.
Obama made some gestures toward the idea that greed and a lack of regulation caused the economic catastrophe. But by and large he regurgitated the old pro-capitalist economic nostrums. That was hardly surprising—pro-capitalist politics mostly hinges on exploited people’s hopes for a better life. Tens of millions wanted to believe what the president-elect was saying—even the ones who didn’t vote for him. Yet as the economic “truth production” process struggled to revive in the following years, trust and certainty evaporated for large sections of the population.
According to the Pew Research Center, by the third year of Obama’s presidency, just 15 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” at least most of the time. The question, given the circumstances, was always going to be how the breach of trust, the lack of certainty and honesty and the breakdown of “truth” would play out politically.
Truth in identity?
The above tells only part of the story, however, and a peculiarly economic one at that. Yet capitalist political “truth” is not only about market rule. And public trust in government collapsed faster during George W. Bush’s presidency than under Obama’s, not for economic reasons. Indeed, the longer-term trend shows a general decline over the last 60 years.
A range of factors—including the atomisation of society, the failure of the radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s to overcome capitalism, and a collapsing labour movement from the 1980s—created the conditions for hyper-personalised political expression in which “truth” became relative long before Trump.
Political theorist Wendy Brown was one of the first to note this in a seminal 1993 essay, “Wounded attachments”. Brown was trying to come to grips with the increasingly toxic nature of progressive politics, searching for the reasons why “politicised identity” becomes self-absorbed, rancorous and self-destructive. In the liberal progressive political universe, oppressions deemed irreducible to a single logic or cause such as capitalism, and to be unintelligible to anyone but the bearer of the particular “wounded attachment”, become owned truths—the property of individuals.
Indeed, progressive political minds were behind the original theorisations of what is now labelled post-truth, valorising diversity for its own sake and shunning calls for class unity as authoritarian and blind to the many variants of “truth” contained in individual experience. As Andrew Calcutt explained at the Conversation some years ago:
“More than 30 years ago, academics started to discredit ‘truth’ as one of the ‘grand narratives’ which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of ‘the truth’, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only ‘truths’—always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised.”
This framework remains widely accepted and promoted on the liberal left. Hence the oft-used comment that someone is speaking “their truth”—something private, unshared. It’s truth as a commodity—individual, marketable, something to trade off, like owning a rare collectable or a customised car. This viewpoint, which is little more than the political expression of foundational capitalist ideology—that private property is the foundation of society and that individuals are the basic unit of the economy—is somehow considered radical and progressive.
How ironic then, that this “progressive” framework is today the guiding principle of far-right politics, in which the burdens of class, both working and middle, are articulated forcefully as white racial identity (and anxiety) and in the yearning to witness humiliation as a means of avoiding it—the impulse to be uplifted by putting, or even beating, others down (something identity-obsessed progressives know a thing or two about).
“The truth has become so devalued that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency”, wrote Matthew Norman in the Independent on the day Trump was first elected. “How internet-reared and internet-addled generations can be taught to venerate provable fact over the lies which reinforce whichever truth they have chosen, I have no idea.”
The US president is a liar and a fraud. Yet liberal commentators like Norman and the editors of the Economist don’t grasp the nature of capitalism’s marketable truth and its uneasy relationships with politics and identity. If they did, they would see that Trump, in a disturbing way, is arguably more real precisely because his mendacity is so transparent.
This is a revised version of an article first published in 2016.
