This past weekend, Rudy Giuliani offered the opinion that, “the truth isn’t truth”. The mayor-turned-epistemologist was barely out of the NBC studio before his comment had produced several smug and unambitious takes on our “post-truth” era, including that from the Washington Post declaring this “is the Trump era’s epitaph”. Well, sure. But, this all depends on what your definition of “is” is, and just how it has previously functioned to kill the truth in US political life.
If you ask me, truth was devastated by the policy class long before Bill Clinton took the verb “To be” out for a stroll in its best blue dress twenty years ago last Friday. If you ask a majority of persons in western liberal democracies, they will likely say the same. Australian surveys consistently demonstrate that Australian voters wouldn’t trust a politician to lie straight in bed. Respondents interviewed in other OECD nations tend to say the same. Not that one needs a discussion paper to sniff what’s in front of our noses: conventional politics is dying along with the truth it has poisoned.
Local commentators often claim that what the local electorate truly craves is a return to some sort of sensible middle-ground. Waleed Aly has made the claim not only that left or right politics have now shed their meaning but they have “almost never been meaningful terms”. Tracey Spicer, apparently unaware of the failure of Third Way politics, predicts the emergence of “a radical centre”. Like their US counterparts, these writers believe in a truth that voters of the west are clearly beginning to reject.
You can hold for all you wish that political consensus can be true, or even useful, and you can say that it is possible to embrace left and right at once. What you cannot do is ignore the rise throughout Europe of actually fascist populism and almost socialist figures.
The “truth” with which an Aly or a Spicer or a US commentator decrying its disappearance holds is not evident to all. Yes, of course it is funny when Kellyanne Conway says that there are “alternative facts” and let us chortle as Giuliani strives to explain what is (let’s be honest) a pretty ordinary example of lawyer talk. What is not, in my view, funny is the abundant failure of media workers to see that “truth” is not even a question for many of us, these days. We simply accept that it has been stifled by decades of bullshit, if it ever was valued in the first place by the policy class at all.
It’s true that a nativist of the Trump sort makes openly untruthful claims. That our largely centrist media class cannot see that he is known, even by people who vote for him, as a bullshit artist confuses me no end. With “truth isn’t truth”, Giuliani accidentally offers an account of the present—one, again, in which very large numbers of people across the west have rejected the “radical centre” that never was. We know that the policy class is overwhelmingly peopled by liars and bullshitters. It should be no surprise that many prefer the latter category.
Your Aly-type is, in my view, a more refined type of “truther”. Sure, he and Spicer are not arguing that this magnet can cure your lumbar pain. They are, however, arguing for a hope just as imaginary: that everyday people see and respect the “truth”, as they do.
To claim in the context of political commentary that one has access to the “truth” is a falsehood. Aly or Spicer or the Washington Post hold that a market-friendly form of economic management should continue. They hold that it is true that one can maintain “respectful debate” against this background of neoliberal policy and no social movement will arise to contest it. They hold that it is true that Trump is an architect of a post-truth age and not its dutiful worker.
Truth is no longer truth and in knowing this, many voters chose a bullshit artist over a liar. A bullshit artist, at least, has a stable relationship with the truth: they ignore it.
This is not to claim a preference for nativist bullshit over polite lies. If I am honest with myself, I’d prefer the polite lies and brutal policy of Malcolm Turnbull to the vulgar “honesty” and identically brutal policy of Dutton. It is to say that, geez, people aren’t as truly thick as the refined truther truly believes.
For decades, we have heard from technocrats who have told us to believe that enterprise bargaining, privatisation, diminished social services and an unregulated finance sector will bring us “growth”. Now, we have newspaper columns who insist the same. They do not concede that their views come from ideology, but, like every ideologue, proclaim them to be true. Perhaps the truthers honestly believe their truth. Then again, maybe Dutton, Trump and all the garish showmen of the nativist right do too.
Either way, “truth” in politics is now as conceivable as faith in democracy. It’s not coming back. And when someone, even a fool, says “truth isn’t truth”, he tells a truth.
The electorate haven’t given up hoping for honesty from the political classes, the media have. Do your fucking job and hunt down the lies. Stop being commentators pretending to be unbiased journalists…or better still, start being journalists who are biased against lies.
Why was Todd Sampson given his own TV show….that’s what I wanna know!
Yes Todd Sampson is the complete ego centric arsehole. I pray that his unshakable belief in himself and his mental powers will lead to his televised death via a freak mind-melding accident with a saltwater croc, or something equally fitting.
I’d watch that episode ch10
The only truth in politics is that the media is obsessed only with the soap opera of politics, the personalities of the players and the inter-personal conflicts, not policy. The media’s obsession with obliterating the complexity of society by making every issue an isolated matter contested by only 2 protagonists perpetuates the myth of Left and Right. And politicians since Hawke and Keating all have fallen into the trap of reflecting the media’s lazy bi-polar analysis. That is a failure of leadership and courage, not a failure of ‘truth’. Truth is elusive. We can only aspire to approach truth, not capture in in HD.
What we need is principle-based pragmatism, not vapid ideological contests. No ideology is devoid of logical flaws. Forget ideology and consider what is truly best for an equitable society and then make economic decisions to support that objective. Instead we get a sterile assumption that we live in an economy, not a society.
For too long much of the media has been prepared to (ab)use their priveleged position to play along with these professional prevaricators, for whatever reason (access, power, sources, personal politics), unwilling to call them over their dishonesty, and been unwilling to treat both sides of politics with equal vigour of analysis (giving one side free kick) : while the “responsible” parts of the media haven’t been willing to call their crook cohort out for the bullshit they help promulgate – in their abuse of “freedom of the press” (sans responsibility). A calling that would be for the greater good of the community they share with us rubes.
Now those chickens are coming home to shit and they can’t see ’em.
Actually Guiliani is completely right – our legal system is based on people standing up in Courts swearing to “tell the truth, nothing but the truths help me God” – then the courts have decide which witness is telling the truth.
Journalists get up in the morning – “my job is to write something, that is what I get paid to do – so to earn my wages better write something that stands out every now and then. My slant on things” Most of the time it is very shallow , has to be as you cannot analyse complex issues in 200 words – besides the crowd cannot read more than 2 paragraphs – or something that is longer than a Twitter.
Then you get idiots like us commenting meaningfully when the journos are really just earning a quid – a lot don’t have analytical capacity we expect.
Des, that’s like, so deep. When you think about it, there is no truth because courts have to find it beyond all reasonable doubt, or something.