The Powerful Rhetoric of Post-Truth Politics

Source: M. H./Pixabay

For the past several years, a common observation about life in America—and the political arena in particular—is that we are living in a “post-truth” world. Media editorial pages and family dinner tables alike lament the decline of “objective truth” in American public life. In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, for example, a writer recalled hearing a “bright college student” and a Hollywood agent both refer to a nonfiction book as a “novel,” citing the erroneous categorization as evidence of “a collapsing boundary between truth and fiction in the public mind.”

Nowhere is this concern over the decline of truth more apparent than in the preoccupation with “fact-checking” Donald Trump and his administration (23,035 “false or misleading claims” according to one recent tally). Politifact, a website devoted exclusively to fact-checking, announces at the top of its home page, “Facts are under assault in 2020,” and warns visitors to the site, “We can’t fight back misinformation about the election and COVID-19 without you.”

As urgent as are such pleas for people to heed the call to “fight back misinformation,” the suggestion that this can be accomplished by simply flagging false claims and countering them with “the facts” fails to acknowledge a fundamental characteristic of human society: People don’t universally agree on what “the facts” are. In other words, one person’s misinformation is another person’s indisputable truth.

Now, acknowledging that other people draw the line between fact and fiction in a different place from where we draw it does not blithely suggest that this lack of agreement over what constitutes “truth” is not problematic. One “truth” that virtually everyone can agree on is that America is deeply, and perhaps even dangerously, divided over where the boundary between fact and misinformation lies. Our strategy of attempting to deal with this divide by fact-checking questionable claims and schooling the people who make them with the real facts, however, is simply not enough. No matter how much incontrovertible evidence we present to “them” (whoever “they” happen to be) they remain entrenched in their illogical position and the chasm between us and them remains. In an article recently published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Mirko Demasio proposes that a potentially more productive approach to the post-truth problem would be to view it from the perspective of a relatively new field of psychological study called “discursive psychology.”

Originating in the late 1980s as a variant of social psychology, discursive psychology is “an approach that focuses on how the psychological is brought to life through discourse.” It “looks at how psychological concepts (attitudes, memories, attributes, etc.) are worked up in discourse as social actions highly attuned to a specific context." The speech through which people interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, then, is less a reflection of reality than it is a medium through which "reality" is constructed. Within this constructed reality, “facts” are not “states of affairs,” but rather “constructions put together for particular purposes.”

From this perspective, to try to fact-check a politician in order to demonstrate to the world that he or she is not telling the truth ignores the fundamentally rhetorical nature of truth: “The act of truth-telling, regardless of its factual accuracy (however one conceives it), is first and foremost among part of a number of discursive activities that are designed to do something in their immediate context.” Discursive psychology approaches ostensible statements of “fact” in political discourse, not to assess whether or not such statements are true, but to determine what type of rhetorical action a speaker wishes to perform with them, and whether or not the attempt is successful.

For example, when we hear Donald Trump, or his attorneys, or the guy standing behind us in the line at Walmart, claim that truckloads of ballots in the 2020 presidential election were dumped in a ditch, or that Dominion Voting Systems electronically switched millions of votes for Trump over into the Biden column, your knee-jerk reaction may be to roll your eyes and say, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t possibly expect anyone to believe that.” This reaction is based on our traditional assumption that the most important consideration regarding such claims is how closely they square up with “factual" reality.

Discursive psychology, however, doesn’t concern itself with whether or not ballots were actually dumped or votes were switched, or for that matter even if the speakers who make these claims actually believe them. The focus of discourse psychology, with regard to such questionable assertions of fact, is their intended rhetorical function, or the effect that a speaker is trying to produce by stating them as “the truth.” By presenting these assertions as truth, again and again and again, Trump and his allies are attempting to construct a reality in the realm of public discourse in which the idea of ballot-dumping and vote-switching becomes every bit as compelling (if not factually demonstrable) as the reality in which the 2020 election was the most secure in American history. While it is highly unlikely that these assertions of “fact” will accomplish Trump’s ultimate goal of remaining in office for a second term, it is impossible to deny that the more immediate goal of creating a rhetorical counterweight to the momentum of Biden’s victory has most assuredly been achieved.

At the conclusion of his article, Demasi rather optimistically speculates that recognizing the rhetorical nature of political discourse can help us see post-truth politics for what it really is—"possibly nothing more than a rhetorical style of our times”—and thus no cause for “lamentation over loss of truth.” Whatever its relationship to objective “truth” may be, post-truth politics is a rhetorical style that has proven enormously successful in producing results, and discursive psychology offers a tool for understanding both how it works and why it is so effective.