The “post-truth” era of American Democracy

The brazen willingness to lie that animates the Romney campaign raises and interesting question.

Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way. Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

It is a simple question on it’s face and easily answered; clearly the media wouldn’t report a campaign going “post-truth” because the media isn’t set up to provide that kind of practicle service.

But the meta-question is worth considering. Are we really in a ‘post-truth” era? I think the evidence points to yes. Look at the antecedents that paved the way to an era in which truth has little to no value.

1.) Key lesson of the climate change debate: you can run a political campaign against verifiable facts, and thereby weaken those facts in the public’s mind.

2.) The Palin factor: you can invent stuff and stick with it when it is shown to be false because culture war politics feeds off the noise and friction when fictional claims are fact-checked by the mainstream media.

3.) David Frum’s observation from within the Republican tent: “Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”

Add to these so-called “fact checking” operations that are shamelessly partisan and a media that has openly eschewed the role of arbitrating between true and false claims.

For a guy who spent the Bush years wondering why the other shoe never dropped, and who naivly believed the old saying “the truth will out,” I feel like I’ve finally woken up.