“Post-Truth” Politics and Illusory Democracy

Straight-talking honest politics: Rhetorical style and ethos in the mediated politics of metamodernity

“…On the other, the act of self-effacement -choosing to ask someone else's question rather than his ownis itself a tacit appeal to the populist integrity of the Labour politician (Browse, 2017: 180-181). Indeed, to return to the comparison with other Labour leaders, whereas Blair might emote or utilise aspects of his own personal biography to construct a sincere, genuine public persona (Fairclough, 2000;Pearce, 2013), Corbyn tends to actively avoid doing so (Browse, 2017: 178-9). I call the Labour leader's indirect appeal to ethos 'curated authenticity' because it derives from his expert ability to curate these experiences and efface his own.…”

Critical and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

“…When, for example so-called climate sceptics align themselves with critical analysts (whether critical philosophers of science or critical discourse analysts) on the basis that both are sceptical of claims to "trust the science" or "believe what you read", we have to start to rethink our relation to "the truth" and "matters of concern" (Latour, 2004). "Post-truth politics", as Fish (2016) remarks, is characterised by a willingness to issue warnings and make claims and promises for electoral advantage with no clear basis in real or future events. And yet, as critical discourse studies suggest, we need to go further than merely suggesting these are questions of lying for electoral advantage -politicians have been doing this for a long time -and move instead towards an alternative account of truth, ideology, discourse and politics (BLOCK, 2019).…”

Real fictions

“…Keyes argued that American culture was becoming less predisposed to value truth. Spurred on by President Trump's electoral campaign and subsequent period in office, or political events such as Britain's vote to leave the European Unionboth of which featured outlandish, truth-defying claimsseveral journalists have since published book-length accounts of the post-truth condition (Ball, 2017;D'Ancona, 2017;Davis, 2017;and McIntyre 2018), and academic research has emerged from a diversity of disciplines, including anthropology (Mair, 2017), communication studies (Hannan, 2018;Harsin, 2015Harsin, , 2018, philosophy (Tallis, 2016), cognitive psychology (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017;Munoz, 2017), politics (Fish, 2016) and stylistics (Browse, 2017, in press). As Browse (in press) notes, both academic and journalistic discourses on post-truth tend to converge on two broad claims:…”