ABSTRACT
“Post-truth” – the new word of the year in 2016 – has been defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. “Fake news” is taken to denote a more specific and conscious spreading of hoaxes and misinformation, most usually via the electronic media. That these terms are descriptive of the circumstances leading to Brexit, and to the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, is itself rapidly becoming a truism. Indeed, in this narrative both events are conflated as manifestations of the same underlying trends; the promulgation of fanciful claims, of mutually contradictory analyses and policies to meet the expectations of different audiences, at worst the pedalling of lies, at best the assertion of emotional “truth” at the expense of expertise and knowledge, and an outright contempt towards rationality and evidence. These are the features, it is argued, that underpin the new populist nationalism, a force that has swept America, the United Kingdom, and threatens to sweep across Europe too, and which has its core support amongst the “left behinds”, the poor and the déclassé, the ill-educated and the elderly. At best, in such a characterisation, these “low information” groups are “dupes” for demagogues and the right-wing media and web, for the promulgators of conspiracy theories and “fake news”. At worst, they are outright xenophobes, the embittered “déplorables” of contemporary life.
