Post-Truth, Post-Democracy and Hyperdemocracy: Exogenous and Endogenous Threats to Democracy

While ‘words of the year’ come and go, the idea of post-truth has had unusual impact and staying power, with to date at least seven books appearing that attempt to analyse the phenomena of Trump, Brexit and other political upheavals in its terms. While journalistic in character, these offer some interesting analytical suggestions, and are in need of assessment in an academic context. They have in common, however, a lack of interest in broader academic debates in democratic theory which might help to situate and understand the characteristics of post-truth politics. There are of course numerous potentially relevant approaches., ‘populism’ being among the most prominent in recent academic discussion. Its relationship to democracy is highly contested, making it more of a field of debate than an analytical resource. One way of understanding the issues in relation to democratic theory is to consider recent critiques under the headings of ‘post-democracy’ and ‘hyperdemocracy’. These perspectives respectively consider the challenge to democracy posed by ‘post-truth’ as having sources exogenous and endogenous to democracy itself. Characteristic of post-democracy analysis is the view that elites of various kinds have regained the political initiative vis-à-vis society at large, and have deployed sophisticated media strategies such as ‘fake news’ not so much to persuade electorates as to confuse and disorient them. At an extreme, even foreign powers are mentioned as drivers of this process, a maximum of endogeneity in the challenge to democracy. But media moguls and political operatives are also identified as avatars of post-truth. I argue that such accounts, while not inaccurate, tend to fall short at the point where the receptivity of the electorate to such manoeuvres comes into question. Mysterious powers of manipulation are attributed to the exogenous challengers, but these are difficult to reconcile with observations of greater sophistication among populations which have been a mainstay of empirical democratic theory for decades. It becomes necessary to think about endogenous sources of the vulnerability to post-truth politics. Here, arguments around the idea of hyperdemocracy become relevant. While in some versions this idea merely reiterates longstanding conservative aversion to democracy, it can be understood in more ontological, as well as developmental, terms as referring to tendencies that are inseparable from the manifold successes and benefits of democracy whose frank acknowledgement conservatives have always resisted. What follows if instead we accept and embrace ideas such as Ulrich Beck’s ‘reflexive modernization’, but set aside his assumption that the effects are always beneficial for democracy itself? This line of thought, first developed in Welch, Hyperdemocracy (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), enables an engagement with the key conceptual question of the relationship between populism and democracy, and also allows a comparative perspective on post-truth which attempts to grasp both why it is most prevalent in American politics, but also why its development there is exemplary and portentous.