6.3 Post-truth

In many ways Nineteen Eighty-Four anticipated the current phenomenon of post-truth. Post-truth may be defined as:

In the following interview, Matthew D’Ancona, a Guardian columnist, sets out what he means by the term and the impact he thinks it will have on the future of politics.

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GEOFF ANDREWS:

This is Geoff Andrews. I’m in Piccadilly at the offices of Drugstore Culture with Matthew d’Ancona, the Editor of Drugstore Culture and a columnist and journalist and the author of Post-Truth. Matt, can I start by asking you to define post-truth?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well I suppose the best definition of post-truth is as a phenomenon really where emotional response and emotional resonance matter more than facts and evidence in decision making and in political discourse. And that’s something really that’s arisen most obviously and most evidently in the years since 2016.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

And why 2016 in particular?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well 2016 was a massively important year because we had the, first of all, the vote on Brexit, which was very much charged by claims of emotional resonance about immigration, about the NHS and about the illusory prospects of Turkey joining the EU on the ‘Leave’ side and that really trumped ‘Remain’ whose arguments were very dry and very statistical. And the parallel to that was obviously President Trump’s very unexpected victory and I for one didn’t expect that to happen but what he managed to mobilise was what I would call a kind of brutal empathy. He had a genius at attributing blame, finding fault with others and for firing voters up without actually making policy prescriptions and it was essentially importing the values of show business into politics. He was up against arguably one of the most credentialed and qualified candidates in presidential electoral history in Hilary Clinton but that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the emotional connection he made with a sufficiency of people that leads to win the electoral college, and that was a milestone I think in this whole process.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

Some people might say there was some developments before 2016. I’m thinking, for example, of, well, the election of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Tony Blair’s defence of the Iraq war. But you’re saying there’s something fundamental in 2016 –

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well I think 2016 was the dramatic culmination of a long process and I think you’re right to identify the Iraq dossiers as a fundamental moment. I think what we saw was in the first, say, fifteen years of the twenty-first century, a very dangerous and dramatic erosion of trust in traditional institutions. The Iraq dossiers were a very good example of that. So was the – obviously – the 2008/9 crash, which dramatically undercut trust in financial institutions. We saw the parliamentary expenses scandal. We saw the hacking scandal in the Press. The BBC had all sorts of difficulties and it seemed like dominoes that all the institutions that had, as it were, mediated trust were falling down. And I think that was a very important prelude to what happened in 2016. I think the other dramatic change was the development of digital technology. It’s extraordinary to reflect that Facebook was only invented in 2004 and yet it and other social media platforms have swept the world in a very short space of time, and also changed the way that we practise politics, and it has driven people into silos. The original promise of the web, to which I signed up, I freely admit, was that it would be a kind of political Nirvana, that borders would melt, that tribes would speak unto one another, that it would be a kind of great unifier. And I still think to some extent it has that capacity but what a lot of us missed I think is that it also encourages people to see more of the same, to look at more of the things that they already like and the algorithms beneath social media do that. They give you more of the things that already fit your preconceptions. So on the one hand you had institutional trust decaying at a rate of knots, and a brand new and extraordinary technology the government really wasn’t on top of driving people into their political silos, and this was a very, very rich and fertile terrain for a certain new kind of politics.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

So there are far-reaching consequences here for liberal democracies in general would you say?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Huge, because liberal democracy essentially has been baked into institutions. Since the Second World War liberal democracy has found itself represented in a series of rule-based international and national structures, which we all are very familiar with and we all identify with. But what has emerged since the internet became almost the dominant force in the world is that everything is now part of a network or networks, plural, and liberal democracy has not yet found its place in that. It hasn’t yet found a way of being kinetic and forceful and expressing itself as a kind of vigour that, say, the populous right have, and this is a real problem because the basis of liberal democracy is we live in a pluralistic society in which various people have different incommensurable values, to use the old phrase, and they negotiate them using the institutions that are at hand. The digital world is one where anything goes and any voices can be amplified and the shrill voices tend to be amplified and re-tweeted the most. So the rules of the game have changed fundamentally and I think liberal democracy is struggling to keep pace with it. I think an allied problem is that we are now entering a world where a lot of people are of voting age who have not really seen liberal democracy at risk. So, I’m old enough to have lived through the end of the Cold War, not the Second World War but I remember vividly the battle between totalitarianism and the free West. A lot of people are grown up now who don’t remember that and have not seen liberal democracy imperilled and so for that generation it’s not obvious that this is something that’s – that’s necessarily precious, worth defending, vulnerable and I think that’s an added complexity to the problem.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

You mentioned populism and a lot of people would say that populism has been the doctrine that’s risen since the global crash of 2007/2008. What is the relationship between populism and post-truth, would you say?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well populism I define as not being popular but presenting or claiming that there are simple solutions to complex problems. So for example, you say America has a problem with illegal immigration. Let’s build a wall. You say that Britain has a series of difficulties. Let’s get out of the European union. These are big, broad brush strokes and because of their simplicity and their boldness they have natural appeal - the digital vectors that we now have make them easy to fire into people’s news feeds with great effect. That sort of populism has I think has – has had a tremendous surge, and I don’t think that the liberal democratic component of the political spectrum has really found a way of answering it – because by definition liberal democracy depends upon the recognition of complexity, because reality is complex.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

You mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and different generations having different political experiences and coming into politics in different ways. But I was wondering why people are still reading ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, George Orwell’s dystopian novel and some for example have made connections between what sometimes happens on social media on Twitter, echo chambers, and some of the language that is used in Big Brother. I wonder if that analogy works for you?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well I always tell undergraduates or people at school who are studying ‘A’ Level Politics, who ask what the best book to read on politics to start with ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ because for me it is still the definitive text. It seems timeless. And there’s a lot in it that’s almost uncannily resonant at the moment. I mean, if you recall when Winston is being interrogated and tortured by O’Brien, O’Brien makes the point that there is no such independent thing as reality. It is what he says it is. If he says two plus two equals five – it does. And he can force anyone to believe anything so I think that that resonates in the current environment which is, you know, the slightly softer version of that is the Trump idea of alternative facts. You know – if you don’t like this fact you get some alternative ones. An interesting twist to the ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ story is that the one thing I think Orwell got wrong was he said that repressive regimes would keep technology down. In the middle of the novel when Winston’s reading the Emmanuel Goldstein book, there’s a section about how it was very important to the New Order to keep technology very, very much under control but in fact what you seeing is a much more complex interaction between the autocracies and the manipulation of technology. And its very striking how quickly the Russians saw the potential for this new technology to be useful in what the KGB used to call ‘active measures’. As early as the 1990s even just after Yeltsin people on the Russian side were starting to build up what became known as ‘hacker farms’ you know waves of cyber attack, long before the West and so I think that that use of technology that the information warfare of the twenty-first century, has been you know an extremely important part of all this.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

Just wondering what post-truth means for the future of political parties which have traditionally drawn on political ideologies or philosophies to some extent. Does post-truth mean the end of ideology? I know we have been there in the past.

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

I think what post-truth has done is, as it were, undercut the tectonic plates beneath ideology and make it possible to say almost anything. You see this very much in – in the way the Right describes Brexit; that now all of a sudden we have Jacob Rees-Mogg saying that the test of Brexit success will be fifty years after the vote in 2016 whereas in the campaign we were repeatedly told this was going to be a light-switch solution to all of Britain’s problems. And so I think you’ll have continued statements of ideological fixity and certainty. I don’t think that will change. But they will actually be underpinned by a complete mobility and what I think Trump represents more than anything is the complete vacuity of conviction. I mean I genuinely think Trump would do or say anything that he thought would be in his interests. And the evidence to date is that that is exactly what he will do.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

You a political columnist, Editor of Drugstore Culture. What does post-truth mean for you as a writer and journalist?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Well obviously it’s a huge threat. It was not a battle I anticipated that we would have to fight because I took it perhaps too complacently as a – as an orthodoxy that we are all at least committed to the truth even if we didn’t necessarily agree on what it was. But that has gone. Or at least it is imperilled and so I think more than ever the political commentator must be absolutely ruthlessly and uncompromisingly committed to finding out first of all what the facts of the matter are, and this is why I’m a big fan of the fact-checking organisations of liberalism, like Full Fact, because I think that they are trying to come up with some solutions to what we can do practically about this; and I think that it’s, you know, the commentators generally should be supportive of this. But what I think you have to be constantly aware of as a commentator is that it’s no longer enough simply to asset the fact; you have to realise that we are now engaged in a battle of narratives, and therefore the way that you present the evidence is almost as important as the evidence itself. The challenge has never been greater. I find myself quite surprised by the scale of the task. I am absolutely up for it, but it’s not a battle that I expected to engaged in at this stage. I think that the truth of the matter is if one is honest that the so-called commentariat or the liberal elite or whatever you want to call it, did become a bit complacent actually and did take it for granted that their categories, their assumptions, their orthodoxies about the merits of globalisation, the proper role of state, the wage gap, social integration, automation, a whole list of issues were pretty much set in stone and that of course is not the case at all. We live in a world of pulverising change and we have to be more nimble and agile than ever before. And I think the one good thing to come out of some very difficult and turbulent times is that it has been a wake up call. I think a lot of people involved in column writing have without believing that they should appease bigotry which absolutely they shouldn’t, have perhaps expanded their horizons a little and gone back to first principles and asked what it is they are actually trying to do and more than anything what their job is because that’s the key. What’s the job? The job is to provide good, well sourced, well-reasoned and useful analysis for people in a civic culture. I mean that’s the job.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

And how’s your job as a journalist changed over the last fifteen or twenty years?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

I think it’s broadened in scope. I started as a trainee on The Times in 1991 and here we are in 2018. When I started the world was absolutely a world of institutions: parliament, parties, party conferences. That was how the world worked. You knew that here was the legislature, here was the executive, here was the civil service, here was number ten. Everything inter-linked very smoothly and you could identify the point on the chessboard where everything was happening. That’s no longer true. To use the rather wonderful image by Eric S. Raymond, who was a coder, who wrote a book about the New Society – quite a prophetic one, called The Cathedral and the Bazaar –we’ve moved from the cathedral of hierarchy and institutions to the bazaar of a flattened democratic digital world in which you have to be very wily to know where the nodes of power are. And that’s – again, that’s the job. The job has changed. Jobs do change. And it’s lazy to assume otherwise. After all, surgeons have to constantly update their knowledge on the basis of advances in medical technology; why should journalistic commentators be any different?

GEOFF ANDREWS:

And finally you mentioned the liberal elite. I was just wondering; you know, the Brexit fifty two per cent and Trump supporters, whether they think all this post-truth is really an attempt by the liberal elite to escape from the realities?

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

I’m sure they do. I mean there’s a cringe sometimes by members of the so-called liberal elite, which is we mustn’t upset the fifty two per cent – or, on the other side of the Atlantic, Trump voters. Well I don’t care about upsetting them; my job is to get to the facts of the matter and I’m sorry some people find the post-truth portmanteau word upsetting. I have no desire to upset anyone, but it’s not gonna stop me in my endeavours. And I also think that – and I also think that post-truth is useful because it’s not actually about the Right or the Left. It’s about how will we get at the truth of the matter and how we move beyond a situation where a basic enlightenment value of truth is imperilled. Now I think every one who thinks for more than two minutes realises that it’s in everyone’s interests that we cling on to some notion of reality. I don’t think it’s a liberal – exclusively a liberal task and indeed one of the interesting things is that a lot of the people who are engaged in this are people who have been, you know, associated with the Right. I mean, David Frum from America, clearly a Conservative but would sign up, I suspect, to most of the things we have been discussing. So I don’t actually see it as a Liberal versus Conservative battle. I think the populist right have been conspicuously the first beneficiaries of the post-truth era but there is no intrinsic reason why it should be the populist right. It could be – it could just as easily be a populist left movement with very strong claims about the ability of the state to transform people’s lives overnight. I mean this is entirely possible.

GEOFF ANDREWS:

Thank you Matt.

MATTHEW D’ANCONA:

Pleasure.

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Post-truth can be compared to the concept of doublethink, a term Orwell introduced in Chapter III of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Doublethink, then, forces people to ignore an objective reality and accept an alternative ‘truth’. The concept of doublespeak also allows you to reflect on the ways in which conspiracy theories and the spread of ‘fake news’ are a characteristic of a post-truth society. Once again, it can be argued that this is enabled by social media – which often serves as an echo chamber and enables lies to spread quickly. One recent example is the ways in which the anti-vaccine lobby was able to perpetrate false claims and stories about the provenance and safety of the various COVID-19 vaccines. Twitter, Facebook and so on now use software to catch automated accounts (known as bots) but many more ‘sophisticated’ bots escape attention. Therefore, another serious concern is the apparent ease by which it is still possible to create ‘fake’ social media accounts (often from so-called troll farms), which can fabricate posts and amplify deliberate lies and other forms of ‘disinformation’ so that they are seen, believed, and passed on by more ‘real people’.

Figure 7 Today’s use of social media enables the spread of fake news

Authoritarian states such as Russia and China appear to routinely manipulate social media platforms to neutralise domestic dissent. However, in recent years there have been credible claims that Russia has used Western social media platforms to attempt to destabilise Western democratic institutions or influence the outcome of certain elections. For example, there were accusations of Russian involvement in the US presidential election of 2016 and the UK pro-Brexit campaign. However, the manipulation of social media is not confined to authoritarian states. Social media is a low-cost method of campaigning. Some would claim that this is a democratising development because it allows more direct forms of democracy. However, critics would also point out that by enabling politicians to bypass the traditional media (the press, radio, and television), it also allows them to bypass its editorial controls as well. The one-time Trump aide, Steve Bannon once claimed that the mainstream media was the ‘real opposition’ to Donald Trump (Gambino, 2017).

Orwell set great store by the ‘truth’. Of course, many politicians have always relied on lying as a strategy to get themselves out of difficult situations. However, what Orwell termed ‘organised lying’ (Orwell, 1946, 1947, p. 383) is not the same as spur of the moment expediency. It is, as Orwell pointed out, systematic and integral to totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes create their own history by ‘rewriting the past’ because it is necessary for the past to be re-shaped to suit the needs of the regime. It was in Spain that Orwell first realised how deliberate, systematic lies may be used as political weapons and how readily those lies will be accepted. In a totalitarian society, only one version of the ‘truth’ is allowed at any given moment. In ‘post-truth’ society there are many versions of the ‘truth’ circulating at any one time. However, if there is less regard for ‘objective facts’ in a post-truth society, does that make it easier for authoritarianism (which may lead to totalitarianism) to gain a foothold?

What is also new about the new era of post-truth is the extent to which it demonstrates how standards in public life have changed. Where it was once obligatory for a politician caught out by a major lie or cover up to resign from office or suffer the consequences, it no longer seems to be an automatic disqualification. Tony Blair’s political career never recovered from the fall-out from the 2003 invasion of Iraq because the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ still mattered to the electorate. Nick Clegg’s reputation among younger voters was irrevocably tainted by his failure to keep a promise on tuition fees made in the 2010 Liberal Democrat election manifesto. However, the Boris Johnson premiership from 2019 encompassed several scandals without leading to resignations.