The Fallacy of Post-truth

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/post-truth-fake-news-trump-clinton-election-russia/

"Liberal writers deploy their own different varieties of post-truth — the social media echo chamber, the prevalence of fake news, the public’s indifference to blatant political lies, or the problem with millennials — to explain what happened in the United Kingdom and the United States this year. They all agree, however, that voters and politicians increasingly deny facts, manipulate the truth, and prefer emotion to expertise.
They also don’t seem to know how we entered this post-fact world or when the factual age, which must have preceded it, ended. Was it in the 2000s, when the whole world debated imaginary weapons of mass destruction before being conned into war? Or was it in the 1990s, when the Lewinsky scandal dominated newspapers, and the United States panicked over superpredators and crack babies? Perhaps it was really Reagan’s 1980s, with its secret, Central American wars, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the denial of the AIDS epidemic. Or maybe we need to go back even further: to Nixon’s not-a-crook 1970s, to George Wallace’s law-and-order 1960s, or to McCarthy’s redbaiting 1950s."

"In fact, liberals’ nostalgia for factual politics seems designed to mask their own fraught relationship with the truth. The supposedly honest technocrats and managers — who enacted neoliberal measures with the same ferocity as their right-wing counterparts — relied on a certain set of facts to displace the material truths they refused to acknowledge."

"The technocratic obsession with facts, however, rests on a post-truth premise. It starts from the belief that economic liberalism’s values — the right to private property, the valorization of self-interest, and formal freedom without material equality — best describe human nature. On this basis, liberal economics devotes itself to realizing human nature in history, defining that movement as progress."

"Liberals found solace in a rising generation of fact-based heroes: Nate Silver used polling data and statistical models to give the political landscape an assuredly quantitative predictability. Vox, headed by Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, promised to explain to readers how complicated policies would really help them, if they would just take the time to study. Even comedy — epitomized by Jon Stewart’s  Rally to Restore Sanity — began to present itself as factual. For these fact-obsessed liberals, political passion was causing problems that only more rationality could solve."

"The people mourning the age of political truth belong to the extreme center. They are the technocrats and administrators who mistrust the experiences and suffering of regular people with as much fervor as the right-wing fringe. They proclaim their horror at this post-truth conservatism, but they agree on many economic policies. The center has been stretched right, so liberals end up calling for the same reforms, albeit with a human face: pension privatization, school vouchers, charter schools, fiscal austerity during recession, and more and more obscene tax cuts for the wealthy."

"The presidential election reveals the emptiness of liberalism’s fact-based politics. The Clinton campaign stumbled against a candidate they had deemed the perfect opponent. First, they thought Trump’s vulgarity would do the job for them, then they threw all their weight into revealing his lies.
In all this, they didn’t present a single positive political vision for change, suppressing one important truth: We cannot reduce politics to good management and correct statistics."