Democracy and Populist-troublemaking: Popular Truth and Politics

In the context of contemporary “post-truth” political struggles, this paper is concerned with how “popular truth,” similar to “public opinion”, is culturally produced before it can be politically exploited. The argument is that popular truth is a social production sandwiched between scientific truth and its mediation in journalistic truth. The primary vehicle for popular truth production, trust, has been deeply compromised with regard to various institutions such as government, economy, journalism, media infrastructure (internet, social media), and to democracy itself—creating challenges for maintaining more durable and socially stable links between those institutions and citizens themselves. Thus, post-truth politics is marked by volatile populist uprisings that are unable to effectively claim the sign of “the people,” yet are materially formidable enough to make governing difficult for any other group aspiring to hegemony. At base is a crisis of liberal democracy itself and the work that popular truth would do in holding liberal democracy together. Post-truth politics are closely linked to post-trust social relations, the professionalization of politics, and what some call “post-democracy.”