Gggrrrr! Must learn not to click too early.
There is quite a bit of discussion in the media about the 'post truth politics' of people such as Trump and Johnson.
This is an article from the Telegraph:
In a world of post-truth politics, Andrea Leadsom will make the perfect PM
Michael Deacon Parliamentary Sketchwriter
One day in summer 1999, the comedian Stewart Lee was riding through London in a taxi when the driver turned to him. “I think,” said the driver, “that all homosexuals should be killed.”
Somewhat taken aback by the abruptness of this announcement, Lee asked why. “Well,” said the driver. “Because homosexuality is immoral.”
Politely, Lee suggested that notions of morality are far from immutable. For example, he said, modern Western society derives many of its fundamental principles – in ethics, aesthetics, philosophy and more – from ancient Greece: a society in which love between two men was regarded as the
purest love of all.
The driver, however, was unimpressed.
“Yes, well,” he huffed. “You can prove anything with facts, can’t you?”
When Lee repeated this line in his stand-up shows, audiences laughed. Maybe they shouldn’t have. Like all great revolutionary thinkers, that taxi driver was simply ahead of his time. Because, if I had to pick a quote to sum up British politics in 2016, it would be that.
We apparently now inhabit a world that appears to be increasingly anti-fact. It’s a world in which campaigners for Brexit unblushingly asserted that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU, and pledged to spend the entirety of this imaginary sum on the NHS. It’s a world in which the defence minister, Penny Mordaunt, falsely told voters that Britain has no veto over Turkey joining the EU. And it’s a world in which 84 Tory MPs happily voted for a leadership candidate, Andrea Leadsom, who has made numerous deeply questionable claims about her career before politics.
The war on truth is being fought every bit as heroically on the Left as it is on the Right. The week before last, a far-Left website, The Canary, published a conspiracy theory about a “Blairite PR firm” masterminding the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn – and saw their nonsense circulated by thousands of people. An employee of the PR firm, Portland Communications, has since said he’s received a written death threat headed “hello comrade” and warning him that “your blood is the price of your treachery”.
In a sense, The Canary captures the spirit of our times perfectly. Its purported aim is to counter the biases of the mainstream media, aka “the MSM” – yet it does so using an eye-popping bias of its own. Jeremy Corbyn, in The Canary’s view, can do no wrong, and his every appearance at the Commons dispatch box is reported as a thundering triumph, no matter how badly he fumbles and falters.
The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally.
Clearly, though, there are readers who are only too willing to swallow it. The Canary is telling them exactly what they long to hear, and – since no other media outlet seems willing to provide this service – they accept its claim to be a brave and lonely voice of truth.
There really is an audience for this type of fantasy. Maybe I should launch a far-Left news site of my own, in which I report that Jeremy Corbyn is currently entering his 10th year as prime minister, poverty has been eliminated and nuclear weapons have been abolished. I could put The Canary out of business within days. Look at those Blairite traitors at The Canary, peddling the lie that Mr Corbyn is merely Leader of the Opposition! How dare they undermine him! No doubt they’ve been put up to it by their paymasters at Portland Communications!
The web and social media have made the spreading of conspiracy theories immeasurably more efficient. And you can see why they’re popular. Conspiracy theories are paradoxically not just angering, but comforting. They tell us that our problems are not our fault, and attribute them instead to a bogeyman enemy – “Zionists”, “elites”, “the Establishment”, “the MSM”. They appear to make sense of a dauntingly complex world, by reducing it to a children’s story about goodies and baddies.
And the more you’re convinced that the world is run by malevolent elites covertly working against your interests, the less likely you are to believe official sources of information. Not only newspapers, but academics, scientists, economists. “I think the people of this country,” sniffed Michael Gove, “have had enough of experts.” Perhaps he was right.
He wasn’t the only Brexit campaigner to identify and capitalise upon public distrust. Arron Banks, the multimillionaire behind Leave.EU, cheerfully attributed his campaign’s success to the mantra “facts don’t work”. Speaking after his referendum triumph, he said: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
In 2016, a politician who lies is said to be ‘running a positive campaign’, while opponents who point out the lies are ‘engaged in personal attacks’
He’s not wrong. Manipulating emotion does work; feelings can beat facts. This is why modern political campaigners love to use the words “positive” and “negative”, “optimism” and “pessimism”: they enable the easy dismissal of criticism.
Thus a politician who lies is “running a positive campaign”, while opponents who point out the lies are “engaged in personal attacks”. Inconvenient facts can be denounced as “smears”, and warnings as “scaremongering”. In the Scottish referendum of 2014, anyone who questioned the Yes campaign’s utopian vision of independence was accused of “talking Scotland down”. This year, anyone who questioned the utopian vision of Brexit was “talking Britain down”.
It’s a simple but effective message. Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic.
In light of all this, I think Andrea Leadsom makes an ideal candidate for prime minister. She embodies the mood of anti-factual “positivity”. On Thursday, during what was billed as “a major speech on the economy”, she mentioned little in the way of policy, but to great cheers spoke sunnily of “hope”, “optimism” and “banishing the pessimists”. She portrayed the fall in the pound as “great news for exports”. And, to show that Brexit hasn’t harmed our economy, she noted that the FTSE 100 was up.
Critics have argued that it was up largely because our currency had plummeted to a 30-year low against the dollar. Yes, well. You can prove anything with facts, can’t you?
