What a crock of s**t to describe 2016 as the start of “post-truth” politics.
The Oxford English Dictionary is reported to have said that “post-truth” is their word of the year. In the Washington Post they commented: It’s official: Truth is dead. Facts are passe.
What world do you live in, where the pre-2016 establishment-sanctioned zeitgeist is “the truth”? The only thing that has happened in 2016 is that millions of working people have shown that they do not accept the world view that has been foisted on them for decades.
The capitalist media are incandescnt that the public are not believing what the capitalist media want them to believe. And with the arrogance that only an establishment incapable of accepting any other truth apart from their own can hold, they patronise the non-believers. They are ignorant. They are uneducated. They are the great unwashed. How dare they have the effrontery to hold beliefs that have not been handed down to them by the great and the good.
The main examples of this post-truth reality the Washington Post cites are the UK referendum on membership of the EU, and the US presidential election.
I am one of those great unwashed who voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The believers in capitalist propaganda would have you believe that I, and millions of people like me, voted out of ignorance. We were led astray by the lies of the official Leave campaign. We swallowed every lie. Because we are stupid. The truth did not matter to us, what mattered was our emotions or our personal beliefs.
The Oxford dictionary definition of post-truth says it means – relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
In their bitterness at losing the referendum, many politicians who campaigned for Remain blame the loss on lies told by the Leave campaign. At the same time they believe that the Leave voters were predominantly the non-metropolitan, predominantly Labour-voting working class. And yet they suggest that this caricature of Labour working-class flat-cap wearing socialist-loving voters were seduced by the lies of the Leave campaign.
But the Leave campaign was dominated by right-wing Tory politicians. Boris Johnson is known to the whole world as a far-right self-serving ambitious opportunist. Do you think your flat cap wearing caricatures of a Labour voter listen to Tory demagogues? Only if you assume they are stupid, ignorant or both.
I do not think you can characterise 17 million people with a few broad brush strokes like that. But I can definitely speak for myself. And I can definitively say that nothing that came out of Boris Johnson’s mouth, or out of MIchael Gove’s lips, had the slightest influence on my voting decision.
In fact, in discussion with other Leave voters (voters whose views differ from my own on many issues) one thing was clear – they were more likely to have been influenced negatively by the pronouncements of the Remain campaign than they were to listen to Gove and Johnson. Because if David Cameron opened his mouth, you knew he was lying. If George Osborne uttered a word, it was a false word.
Post-truth is not the correct word for what is happening now, either in the UK or in Europe. To call it post-truth, you have to believe that what was happening before 2016 was truth. It never was. Working people are becoming increasingly aware that both sides of the mainstream political divide are liars. If they reject your lies, you call it post-truth.
There is something Orwellian about that.