At the start of this dissertation, which I had begun drafting ideas for in August and September, it seemed almost certain that Hillary Clinton was set to take the Presidency. As a result of Trump’s shock win, the entire course of this dissertation had to be altered drastically. My hypothesis that the nadir of post-truth politics was over in the West proved to be grossly mistaken, and was re-written accordingly to reflect how elections shaped by nationalism and populism in other parts of the world could have served as a warning to Britain and the United States for their elections. I will focus on how social media has enabled the rapid rise of a post-truth environment, and its role in manipulating recent elections in the case studies I have researched.
Introduction
It is hardly a new and radical concept that politicians lie, particularly during important national elections. Therefore, my biggest challenge in writing the dissertation initially was to be able to critically distinguish between a lie in politics, versus a “post-truth” lie. The thesis will go on to state how and what the explicit difference between the two are, along with other terms that follow such as “post-truth era” and “post-truth society”.
The term “post-truth” is itself a modern term in western political discourse; it only made an appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, where it was named word of the year due to its sudden surge following Brexit. Casper Grathwohl, the President of the OED was quoted in late 2016 saying “given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time”, (Flood, 2016). This is in reference only to Britain and the United States however, where post-truth was acknowledged after other parts of the world had experienced it.
The most pressing issue of recent international politics is arguably the rise of the far right not just in Europe and America, but worldwide. This essay will focus on the provenance of this upsurge of populist rhetoric to enter the political discourse, and how it has affected electorates and elections. An obvious criticism of the word “post-truth” is that the term is simply irrelevant if we are to assume that politics and lies are inextricably linked. At which point does one determine where post-truth politics was created? One might argue it was employed as early as the Second World War during the mass propaganda that was employed by both allied and axis powers. Through the course of this essay, I will seek to establish that post-truth politics can only exist within a post-truth society. Whilst the Western press has only recently coined the term “post-truth”, and a debate exists over whether to even recognise the term as new, we must consider an altogether different possibility. That is, that post-truth society is not a western phenomenon as recent opinion pieces make it appear. In this essay, a key theme that I will link to the rise of post-truth politics in Western elections is the prevalence with which it has already been appearing in other countries already.
As case studies, I have decided to use the Indian General Election of 2014, and the Israeli elections in 2015 because these two elections demonstrate how populist movements have been gaining pace in other parts of the world. I will provide further context of the societies of the two countries as it is crucial to understand how Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Modi managed to win these elections. I believe it was a telltale sign for how Western candidates adopted their strategies in order to win elections such as the British referendum on EU membership and the US presidential election. The focus of my research will therefore be not only on Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign, but also on the aforementioned national elections and events of political significance leading up to them. This will allow a nuanced frame of reference to two other democracies in other parts of the world that have already been exposed to post-truth politics long before Britain and the United States were. This is in line with my thesis, which is that the advent of Post-Truth politics the UK, Europe and the United States are facing was in fact predictable if we looked further afield to parts of the world where the seeds had already been sown for a post-truth society. The Israeli and Indian elections are significant because both countries are democratic, however specifically chose a political path that they knowingly acknowledged might lead to increased autocratic politics. An example is the unprecedented number of public roles Netanyahu has assumed- in addition to the premiership, Netanyahu also serves as foreign minister, communications minister, economy minister and regional development minister. The proliferation of social media is a crucial element in perpetuating the spread of post-truth politics, with websites Facebook and Twitter allowing the rise of fake news articles that the sites refused to take down due to freedom of expression policies. This has therefore allowed the spread of misinformation even in democracies, a feat only previously achieved through an authoritarian state’s control of media.
A brief introduction of “Post-Truth Politics”
In terms of using classical political theory as a guide for how post-truth societies emerge, one has to look no further than Plato’s allegory of the cave for an example of how a society can be deceived easily to believe a mis-truth. Noted political theorist Hannah Arendt states, “he who forced his fellow citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehoods and illusion was in danger of his life” (Grosch, 2008). We can see that in the allegory of the cave, Plato highlights that the appeal of holding to an incorrect belief is stronger than being presented with the evidence that the cave is merely a shadow of the real world. If we apply this allegorical tale to modern politics, we might draw comparisons between the cave-dwellers Plato described, and the populaces of a post-truth society. Post-truth politics requires a rejection of facts, and a group of individuals to collectively embrace partial truths or complete lies. The lies are likely to appeal to populist sentiment, and emotion rather than offering any concrete evidence or fact- the exact definition of post-truth being “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016).
Now we come to the fundamental difference between a lie in politics, and a post-truth lie. I will address this in the introduction as it important to distinguish early on before the case studies what makes “post-truth” so different. A lie in politics is for example Bill Clinton lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky with the infamous quote “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”. This was quickly deduced to be a lie with evidence and testimonials- in this example, a federal grand jury investigating and leading to impeachment proceedings. A post-truth lie is far more subtle, and insidious. Let us take the example of the claim during the lead-up to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, that £350 million a week is sent to the EU from Britain. This claim originated on Twitter, and had gathered so much traction by the date of the referendum that 47% of the British public believed this claim to be true (Ipsos MORI, 2016). The further claim by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson that this sum could then be used to increase government funding to the NHS was a major factor in determining the outcome of the referendum. This figure was discredited by the BBC, Channel 4 News, and Full Fact- yet the Leave campaign continued to cite this figure despite the overwhelming evidence that it was false. More recently, the London Economic publication uncovered an essay composed by the director of the Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, who wrote “Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no” (Peat, 2017). This admission is of huge national significance, as it suggests one simple lie regarding Britain’s EU fees per week shaped the outcome of out referendum. We can see therefore, that a major defining feature of a post-truth lie is its continuity despite being contradicted by evidence-based counter claims. When a regular political lie is exposed as false, such as that of Bill Clinton’s, the disseminator of this false information retracts the statement or apologises with an admission of guilt and the subsequent truth is uncovered. A post-truth lie is repeated- which has the effect of the veracity of the claim being forgotten as people focus on the sensationalism of the statement rather than if it is truthful or not. An example of this might be the so-called “birther movement”, started by Donald Trump in 2011 regarding the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and widely seen as a test run for the later outrageous post-truth campaign he would craft.
“Post-truth” has recently been named the Oxford dictionary word of the year. This is hardly surprising, given the results of the British referendum to leave the European union, the electoral success of Donald Trump in the USA, and the global rise of populist movements that have gathered most pace in Europe. It seems unthinkable that an unashamed demagogue has won the most important and powerful leadership role in the world. Trump ran on a platform of racism, outright misogyny, homophobic undertones, and as a result tapped into the deepest fears of the majority of the American electorate. This is a fundamental characteristic of what defines “post-truth” politics as an entirely separate entity from mere political lies, or distortion of facts. It has emerged as a movement fuelled explosively through social media, where mistruths can be shared on a platform to millions in a matter of seconds.
The United States Presidential Election 2016, and the success of Trump
After having concretely decided upon the focus and research of my dissertation in early September, I had formulated the thesis that Donald Trump’s expected defeat in the presidential elections of 2016 would mark the end of a post-truth narrative that seemed to have gripped Britain and other parts of the world in populist movements. After the results of the election, I altered my thesis to reflect the devastating effects post-truth rhetoric has had on the outcome of democratic elections. I will therefore begin my first case study analysis on the campaign and subsequent behaviour of Donald Trump as he wages a war against the mainstream media in the United States. The nature of post-truth politics is inextricably linked to identity politics- in particular, race has been the predominant defining feature of the most significant recent election results. Donald Trump’s claims to “build the wall”, painting Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals have exposed the deep racial divides in the United States. On balance, this has had an epistemological effect on the population centres where large numbers of latinos reside, such as parts of Texas and New Mexico, where immigrants from Latin America have entered legally but still are treated with the suspicion and sometimes violence usually only reserved for illegal immigrants. Most troubling however are the recent statistics documenting violence against Muslim Americans. Research from the FBI and PEW statistics show that levels of anti-Muslim assault are at their highest levels since the September 11th attacks (Kishi, 2016). This attempt at “othering” is a feature of post-truth politics whereby Trump has tapped into existing fears of immigration, and combined it with a radical and controversial solution in the form of “building the wall”.
An issue that has been brushed under the carpet in light of the shocking result of the United States’ election is the role that the mainstream media played in advancing the popularity and screen-time of Donald Trump. In the early stages of the election, CNN broadcast Trump’s speeches without political commentary. This is unprecedented for an election of such importance, and is compounded by the fact that CNN has a markedly liberal leaning. Not only did this allow right-wing press to dominate the political debate and criticise the Clinton campaign for refusing to address the deleted emails scandal (Jose a. DelReal, Washington Post), but it gave Trump a nationwide television platform with unbridled access to launch attacks on Clinton that were not criticised or commented upon by members of the American press for the beginning of the race between the two candidates.
Politico magazine aptly points out that “Trump artfully created the media that in turn created Trump the presidential candidate” (Shafer, 2016). Whilst I am skeptical of the theme of this article claiming that the American media ought to exonerate themselves despite having empowered Donald Trump, and effectively paving his way to the White House, the article at least raises the important point that Trump is a master at generating controversy; and thus headlines. Incendiary remarks make successful news in a society where information is available 24 hours a day, and where newspapers are forced to consider printing ever more sensational stories in order to keep up with fast-paced platforms such as Twitter. The temptation to run ever increasingly sensationalist stories was made abundantly clear in the US election cycle. A notable example of this that concerns race in particular is Trump’s explicit remarks concerning a nationwide blanket ban on “Muslims entering the United States” (Trump, 2016). This galvanised Trump’s supporters to the extent that in the aftermath of the election, race hate crime rocketed against “Muslims, Hispanic Americans, black people, ethnic minorities and the LGBT community” (Dearden, 2016), which corresponds highly with the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s statistics that in the first month after Trump’s victory “1064 race hate incidents occurred” (Slate, 2017). In an attempt to back-pedal after he had implemented the ban through executive order, and distance the White House from the surge in hate crime, Trump tweeted “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe” (Nguyen, 2016), in reference to the ban which had imposed a blanket travel restriction on seven Muslim majority countries for 90 days (Rothwell & Kroll). The statistics by the Southern Poverty law Centre correlate strongly with data collected in the United Kingdom following the Brexit referendum. This recorded that just one day after the referendum, hate crime had soared by 42% in England and Wales (Mortimer, 2016). This statistic will be addressed in the Brexit case study, and will elaborate on the post-truth connection between the US race hate statistics versus that of the UK.
Research undertaken by linguistic and sociological scholars on Donald Trump’s discourse find that his language patterns are inconsistent with other Republican candidates who posed a threat to him early in the Republican national campaigns. This is a feature of post-truth as a populist candidate is more likely to change their speed depending on the constituency. This correlates with other research undertaken by scholars on populism, who posit that the discourse of right-wing populist parties “depends on the nature of their constituency: The style is adapted to fit the needs of the heartland” (Albertazzi, 2007). Trump adapted his speeches throughout his campaign depending on location, in many cases matching political theatric to the sentiments of localities. This populist tactic is typical of post-truth, and was seen notably during the Leave campaign of Brexit. “Grandiosity” is a feature of such speeches, where adjectives relating to size (“big, huge” etc) and beauty (“beautiful, elegant” etc) are used frequently in political speeches- adjectives that were extensively used throughout the Trump campaign to describe the proposed border wall with Mexico (Earle, 2017). Despite the sensationalism of these claims, major public broadcasters in the United States between August-September 2016 dedicated far more screen time to Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This correlates with the theories by which right-wing populists are able to gain a following, where “to appear effective and legitimate, right-wing populist party leaders need the media as a platform” (Bos et al, 2011). The danger of a media doesn’t “prioritize issues of profound importance” (Fateh, 2016), is that it oxygenates controversial statements and allows them to be normalised. This is not unique to a political environment- for example, it can be examined through a corporate lens as well. Shareholders are more likely to respond to “strong-man” language with a focus on grandiosity and “destructive narcissism”, involving the word “I” and “my” more often than usual (Craig & Amernic, 2011). On use of first person pronouns, Trump also ranked highest- and significantly higher than the mean of the other eight Republican candidates(Ahmadian et al, 2016). As a result, Donald Trump was given undue influence in the political debate in the lead up to the election through major news outlets seeking to capitalise on his outrageous statements without offering critiques and counter-arguments from the other candidates. Trump’s influence is compounded by the prolific rate at which he tweets- dozens of times a day in the final months to the election. Political linguist analysts have noted that Twitter in particular due to its condensed form of communication is defined by three key features: simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility (Ott, 2016). This tendency towards a “mean” tweet therefore is similar to generating controversy that news channels clamour to air. As a result, Trump had the perfect balance of the endorsements from major news channels that allowed an air of credibility to be formed around him, combined with the informality of reaching millions of people directly through the medium of Twitter. Given that Twitter structurally disallows the communication of detailed and sophisticated messages (Ott, 2016), it is difficult to formulate a counter-argument to the content of the tweet in a way that will receive the same exposure as the original tweet. Trump capitalises on this by refusing to address inconsistencies that are pointed out in his tweets. Most recently, following the dismissal of the FBI chief James Comey, Trump tweeted “Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!” (Trump, 2017). This tweet in particular correlates with the aforementioned findings concerning grandiosity and narcissistic speech patterns, with a claim firstly that is purposefully vague and difficult to verify, along with the trademark statement that suggests superiority of knowledge and recommendation of deference to the President.
On balance therefore, we can see Trump mastered the art of post-truth through mixing legitimacy gained through the mainstream media endorsing him indirectly, combined with is ability to disregard political precedents set in the United States and attack Clinton and the opponents directly on Twitter. This “infotainment” allowed ordinary users in the periphery of political engagement to feel more included as a result (Bos et al, 2011), similar to how Narendra Modi has used his social media prowess to target disaffected members of Indian society. This will be examined in the Indian case study for a nuanced comparison of how world leaders use Twitter as an effective vehicle.
Case Study- Israel’s post-truth society and the 2015 General Election
The Israeli General Election of 2015 arguably demonstrated features of Israeli society having made the transition into a post-truth one. This particular Israeli election is an important political litmus to measure the scale of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump against another populist candidate, in the form of Benjamin Netanyahu. This case study will attempt to analyse how the Israeli General Election is a useful example of how post-truth rhetoric and populist policies led to the re-election of the incumbent Prime Minister, and how the Israeli elections could have served as a warning and sign of the inevitability of populism that would come to shape both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For this case study, I was able to interview a renowned Israeli journalist at Haaretz, Israel’s leading English newspaper. Due to concerns over political sensitivities and possible recriminations from far-right groups, I have chosen to omit the journalists name from the dissertation, however they provided me with valuable insight and statistics into how Israelis voted in 2015 as a result of populist policies touted by Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and by the conditioning of the Israeli electorate beforehand into becoming a post-truth society.
The case of Israel is unique- as a country that sits in a hostile geopolitical region with regular threats directed towards the state, it has developed a society that is modelled around a permanent state of readiness and preparedness for armed conflict. This is simply accepted as fact, and politicians across the Israeli spectrum insist that the country must always preserve the right to pre-emptive strikes. For example, the latest war that Israel engaged in with Gaza in 2014 was initiated on the claim that Hamas had kidnapped three Israeli hikers and murdered them. No evidence was put forth for this wildly inflammatory claim, and Israel responded heavy handedly with artillery strikes as soon as Hamas began to fire rockets. This suggests that Israel was simply waiting for a timely excuse to attack the Gaza strip, a theory endorsed by the Jewish Daily Forward with “Journalists who heard rumors [about the emergency call] were told the Shin Bet wanted the gag order on the deaths to aid the search. For public consumption, the official word was that Israel was 'acting on the assumption that they’re [the hikers] alive.' It was, simply put, a lie,” (Goldberg, 2014). This clearly shows that the Shin Bet (Israel’s elite ministry of interior intelligence) knew prior to the conflict that the Israelis were dead- but still had no evidence to suggest Hamas was behind the kidnappings. Al Jazeera’s investigations corroborate with these claims, and they reported that “A two-year inquiry into the 2014 Gaza war by Israel's official watchdog has found that the government failed to explore diplomatic solutions to prevent the seven-week conflict”. For direct criticism to be levelled at the Israeli government by an Israeli institution is rare in itself, but the report detailed that Netanyahu was personally at fault due to failing to alert the cabinet that a system of tunnels posed a “strategic threat” (Al Jazeera, 2017) to Israel. What is surprising is that the internal investigation took so long to publish- with minimal outcry from the Israeli public. This might be helped by the fact that the Israeli Army is the most trusted institution in the country- well ahead of academic and political institutions. The word of the Israeli Defence Force therefore, is highly trusted with 82% of Israelis ranking them in first place- dwarfing the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) which comes in second to last place with 38% (Times of Israel Staff, 2016). Therefore, we can establish that the Israeli public is more willing to believe the IDF over the Israeli government. As a result, the Israeli public is willing to believe IDF spokespersons, when they comment on situations such as that of the escalating tensions in Gaza, and the need for Israeli intervention. Amongst the most shocking claims the IDF made during the course of the 2014 Gaza War, is that Hamas used Palestinian civilians as “human shields”. This sensational claim that originated from the IDF was entirely debunked in an independent UN fact-finding mission, which stated “A number of incidents, along with the high number of civilian deaths, belies the [Israeli] claim that all necessary precautions are being taken to protect civilian lives.” (Hasan, 2014). What makes the Israeli claim even more incredible is that Israel has allegedly used Palestinians as human shields during operations conducted in Gaza- “Israeli soldiers used an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield, forcing him to walk in front of them at gunpoint and enter potentially booby-trapped buildings to check for explosives.” (Khalek, 2014), with the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights endorsing this claim. This is a feature that distinguishes a post-truth lie from a political lie- Arab publications have noted that combining “ ‘human shields’ with ‘legitimacy,’ the equation for blatant misrepresentation is perfect” (Wadi, 2014). Yet, despite this overwhelming evidence debunking the “human shield” claim to account for the extremely high Palestinian civilian casualties in the 2014 war- 1,492 (Zonszein, 2015), the majority of Israelis and a large number of Americans believe the claims that Hamas uses human shields. The claim is further diminished when considering incidents such as four children being killed on Gaza’s beach in an Israeli shelling, witnessed by many foreign journalists. This was another supposed example of combatants using “human shields”, yet there were no combatants from Hamas present on the beach. Human Rights Watch described the attack as “unlawful” (Speri, 2014), and criticised the IDF for claiming shelling was a form of precision attack. Similar to the Indian style of post-truth politics, what the IDF has successfully done is blend an existing false story that resonates with the Israeli electorate (human shields), and combined it with the claim that the IDF only uses precision guided weapons to combat Palestinians.
As a result, the Israeli public and others abroad who air the claims as well are conditioned into believing that the innocent bystanders are somehow implicated in acts against the state of Israel, as they would surely not have been killed by “precision weapons” unless they were a combatant or very close to one. This is analysed in studies of Israeli public policy during times of war, where organisations dedicated to “Hasbara”, or public diplomacy, attempt to influence the narrative of events to favour the state of Israel. The Jerusalem Post provided an in-depth analysis of Israel’s attempts to influence the dialogue, and wrote “The purpose of the campaign, the official said, is to show the context to the suffering in Gaza, and to show that Hamas is “sacrificing its people on the altar of its radical ideology.” (Keinon, 2014). This slick media campaign, which the IDF conducts on Twitter, is part of what Arab scholars have termed the “Hasbara 2.0”. It started in 2010, when the IDF simultaneously set up accounts for blogging, Twitter, and YouTube (Aouragh, 2016), immediately following the international outcry following the Gaza flotilla raid where 10 Turkish activists were murdered in “international waters, 130km from the Israeli coast” (BBC, 2016). The IDF thought it imperative to join Twitter in order to limit brand damage both domestically and internationally in the wake of the attacks, condemned as illegal by the United Nations and calling for the Gaza blockade to be lifted (Ban Ki-Moon, 2010). Despite the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish humanitarian vessel happening in international waters, Israel faced no legal punishment from the international community partly due to the strength of its foreign ministry in repeating the phrase “the state has a right to defend itself”. This success of the Israeli government in promoting its narrative abroad was reflected upon by noted political theorist Edward Said, who pointed out that “Palestinians really have few, if any positive connotations. They are almost completely dehumanised”.
Now I have established clearly that there is strong evidence to suggest a climate of chronic political mistruth already existed in Israel, I will examine the effect that post-truth media in Israel has had on the most recent election. Statistics from the 2015 election show that it was the most well-attended election since 1999, with voter turnout up almost 5% from the previous election at 72% (Atmor & Friedberg, 2016). There is an historic trend in Israeli society that poorer voters, who tend to be Arabs living in rural Arab-Israeli towns, turn out at the polls far less than Jewish voters- particularly those in the large metropolitan areas of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Amor & Friedberg in their sociological analysis of the election noted that geographical locations correlated greatly with voter turnout, stating that “engagement in geographic peripheries act as a metaphor for citizens being on the periphery of political engagement”. The findings of these Israeli scholars’ correlates with political patterns worldwide- that the politics of poverty ensures poorer members of society are more likely to be disenfranchised partly or totally. To some extent, this correlates with the ballot effects in the US where without a high-school diploma, poor children are four times more likely than their college-educated peers to be unemployed and “10 to 20 times more likely to end up behind bars”, (Weeks, 2014). This is compounded by the fact that felons in the United States convicted of a felony are barred from voting for some period of time in all but two states (data from the NonProfit Vote Org). As a result, we can see that poverty plays a significant role in electoral patterns worldwide. In the 2015 Israeli election, this was no different- with areas of higher poverty in the South of the country registering 10% below the national voting average in the general election. However, the research also pointed out that in certain parts of the country, voter turnout was the highest it had ever been in an election- over 10% higher than the 2015 national voter turnout at 83%. The localities that these high results occurred in had one specific feature in common, which is that they all compose extremely religious members of Israel’s Jewish nationalist population. This discrepancy of 20% between the poorer Arab neighbourhoods, versus the very religious Jewish population centres can be explained by the post-truth rhetoric that Netanyahu’s Likud Party churned out in the final days of the election. In what was seen as an attempt to galvanise his rightist base during the 2015 election, Netanyahu had warned on Election Day in March 2015 that “Arab voters are going in droves to the polls” with the help of “left-wing” activists (Times of Israel, 2016). He went on to state in the same video that high turnout by Arab voters was “putting right-wing rule in danger” (Netanyahu, 2015). This is of critical importance given the timing at which Netanyahu delivered the comments, perceived globally as causing deep divides n the fractious elections where the Arab coalition formed against his Likud party were gaining more votes than in any previous election. The video was released on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and clearly had an effect in the religious Jewish localities when Netanyahu threatened explicitly that his right-wing government was being seriously challenged by the joint list opposition parties. Netanyahu claimed in the same video that Arab voters were being “bussed into the polls by left-wing NGOs”. This is another example of a post-truth lie; it capitalises on the fear of Arabs dominating the Jewish Israeli electorate at the voting booths, and also taps into the fear and distrust the Likud Party has manufactured against left-leaning NGOs in Israel that they claim are “foreign funded” (Shaked, 2015).
The British Referendum on EU membership 2016
In June 2016, all polling suggested that the British referendum on membership of the European Union would be comfortably to remain in the union. When the referendum was won with 52% of people voting to leave the Eu however, this marked the first significant moment in British electoral history that opinion polls, projected exit polls, and experts on psychological voting patterns were proved wrong. Just as the case studies aforementioned in the United States, India and Israel, the campaign to leave the EU was won primarily through deceit and the extensive use of post-truth statements and false facts.
The biggest exposed lies of Brexit that this dissertation has already mentioned is the claim that Britain sends 350million a week to the EU, and the further claim by Nigel Farage that this sum could be used to fund NHS short-falls. Despite the claim being directed and disproved conclusively after the referendum, no polls have been conducted as to how this major lie affected the outcome of the vote, which was claimed to be 50/50 in the week leading up to the election (Kirk 2017). However, the Advertising Standards Agency have stated that the Leave campaign is immune from prosecution due to political advertising being exempted from ASA regulation. As a result consumers are protected form corporations, “but you can claim that £350m a week will go to the NHS instead of the European Union” (Lewis, 2016). This corresponds with Kings College London’s research into the referendum which states that the “UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning” (Moore, 2016). In the face of post-truth rhetoric, the Guardian refers to the democratic vote as a “train robbery” (Cadwalladr, 2017), whereby the democratic vote was hijacked by the Leave campaign and their donors through the spread of misinformation on Twitter. There is current debate over whether there was undue influence through the use of automated bots that posted Pro-Leave messages on Twitter. Twitter hashtags, keywords that pertain to a popular topic (Sankaranarayanan et al, 2009), are a key post-truth tool that were potentially used very effectively by the Leave campaign, unbeknownst to the Remain campaign. That is, that most “instances of #brexit still accompany messages about leaving the EU. The second most popular #brexit hashtag (#voteleave) is still used three times more than the most frequent encouraging membership (#StrongerIn)” (Howard & Kollanyi, 2017). This suggests a purposeful obfuscation of the debate through the Leave campaign actively encouraging the use of the hashtag “VoteLeave”.
Theresa May posited that the economic arguments for remaining in the EU were significant, and told a gathering at Goldman Sachs “I think the economic arguments are clear. I think being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe” (May, 2017). Theresa May expressly tried to appeal to the public to stay in the EU, however performed a swift about turn on her opinion when the referendum was over. May’s attempts to persuade the British public that Brexit can be “made a success of” is a notable example of post-truth politics- “Now she is loudly and proudly following a policy she does not believe in, and following the most extreme version of that policy anyone can imagine” (Cohen, 2017). This total U-turn corresponds with Swastika Mehta’s theory of the “zeal of the political convert”, whereby in a post-truth environment the most important politicians and leaders of parties pander to the most popular policies, even if it means contradicting their earlier beliefs entirely.
Case Study- the Indian General Election 2014
The Indian national elections of 2014 were a sweeping victory for the party of Hindu nationalism, Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP. The election was such a success in fact that the BJP is the first single-party government, in a country usually governed by coalitions, since 1984. Their victory saw the Indian National Congress party defeated so heavily, that they only won 44 seats out of 545 in India’s lower house of parliament. This figure is so low that it does not even reach the minimum amount of 10% to be considered India’s opposition party, meaning the country since the election has not had an official opposition party according to the Press Information Bureau of India in 2014. The election was characterised by the BJP levelling numerous claims of corruption against the governing Congress party, and stirring up populist sentiment by accusing the Congress Party of acting “dynastically”, with members of the Nehru-Gandhi family handing down power as a familial tradition. This had the effect of stirring anti-Congress sentiment in favour of Narendra Modi, a candidate who emphasised his humble origins and policies of Hindu nationalism, his history reported by Al Jazeera as “At eight, Modi associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the RSS, a powerful Hindu nationalist group which rejected secularism”. This stood in stark contrast to Rahul Gandhi, the current scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, a family that has been in charge of India for 40 of the 70 years since the country gained independence.
The Western elections that I have so far focussed on; the US Presidential election and Brexit, show that post-truth is a relatively new feature of Western political discourse. This case study will demonstrate how post-truth has existed in India for decades- perhaps even longer, and that there are conspicuous similarities between how the Indian public was conditioned to accepting post-truth lies in a similar way the American and British public have been more recently. Parallels between India’s tumultuous election cycle, filled with post-truth lies, versus that of the United States’ election first started to be noticed by the US Press only after Donald Trump had been elected. Ranjit Goswami of US News notes “India’s post-truth era cannot be traced to a single year – its complexities go back generations. But the election of Narendra Modi in 2014 can be marked as a significant inflection point” (Goswami, 2017). Let us take a sensationalist example, that the BJP continues to perpetuate today; the case of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, who the BJP has repeatedly claimed is a recipient of CIA funding. The most recent quote from an Indian tabloid regarding the matter is “the NGO Kejriwal ran while being a member of the Indian Revenue Services, was funded by the Ford Foundation, which in turn was supported by the CIA” (Sehgal, 2016). The article goes on to state that these are allegations, but makes no reference to the source of the allegations, and continues to repeat them throughout. What is more bizarre is that the article then goes on to list a minor tax infraction that Kejriwal committed- “he was forced to repay Rs 9.2 lakhs by income tax department, which he had cheated off” (Sehgal, 2016). As a result, we can see this article has attracted attention through a sensationalist headline, but then dotted the article with smaller anecdotes of Kejriwal’s untruthfulness and character. This corresponds highly with the theories presented by Grzegorz Kolodko, who posits that the media will often behave in a manner intended to frighten politicians to maintain their monopoly in dictating political discourse- “the criticism may be ideological and it may be personal. Its true intent is always camouflaged” (Kolodko, 2008). This is a prime example of drawing to attention a relatively minor offence of tax evasion through the reputation of a post-truth claim, that Kejriwal is in some manner connected with the American Central Intelligence Agency. Furthermore, the claim focuses on a long-held belief by the Indian public that back-channel operations and restrictions by the CIA and Mi6 play a part in hindering India’s own covert actions, such as the pre-emptive attack against Pakistani militants who were planning terror attacks against India, widely referred to as “surgical strikes” in mainstream Indian media. What we have therefore in the case if India, is a subtle blend of a post-truth lie using repetition of a mistruth, combined with a historic anti-CIA sentiment that is specific to India. The result is a highly negative attitude of the Indian public towards Kejriwal, with his approval rating dropping from 60% to 50% as the story continues to be spread about his alleged links to the CIA (Chaudhuri, 2016). After having researched the role of the CIA and Mi6 in Indian affairs regarding national security, I was able to discover that there is indeed some truth to the fact that the CIA has some interest in the Indo-Pakistan border, but to what extent the CIA meddles in Indian affairs is another matter. What is important to the discussion of Indian post-truth politics is how fact and fiction are intertwined in slick campaigns such as that run by the BJP media team. Apparently “until 1993-94, the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) literally forbade the RAW from launching covert operations in Pakistan” (Nandy, 2016). This statement is extremely hard to verify due to the tradition of national defence ministries refusing to comment on clandestine operations, however it is a prime example of how post-truth stories are given mainstream platforms. The claim is an attempt to frame the CIA of undermining Indian sovereignty in hindering its ability to strike back against Pakistan, however Chandan Nundy does not point out in his opinion piece that cross-border clandestine activity is illegal for all states under international law. This is consistent with the Berkeley La Raza Journal of Law, which states “the aggressor opens itself up to international law”. As we can see, the Indian media has produced a cascade of interlinking pieces that dubiously connect Arvind Kejriwal first to the CIA, and then connect the CIA to India’s inability to strike back against Pakistani militants across the border. Swastika Mehta of NDTV, India’s largest English-speaking news channel, told me in our interview “I believe this entire slew of negative media articles directed against Kejriwal is a co-ordinated media witch hunt instigated personally by the Prime Minister and the media wing of the BJP, attempting to discredit his Aam Aadmi party” (Mehta, 2017). Furthermore, Mehta points out that the slew of articles she describes is all in English. This is hugely important, as it suggests the creator of this false content is aiming at a specific audience in India- the middle and upper-middle classes who speak English fluently. This correlates with middle-class disaffection towards the political process in older democracies. The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media conducted multiple studies on disaffection and negativism, and concluded that “Specifically, negativism appears to be a double-edged sword, with active media use an important intervening variable” (Pinkleton, 1998). As a result, the post-truth climate has encouraged the Indian media to produce articles for the Indian middle-classes as their disaffection ironically makes them more interested in the political process by reading negative articles pertaining to individuals or opposition parties. This further corresponds with the theories Pankaj Mishra posits in his forthcoming book, where he states “Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new ‘irrationalism’ through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism” (Mishra, 2017). The tying of “irrationalism” to the political elite is a trend that is not unique to the Indian example however; we can see that the biggest lies told during the Brexit campaign by the Leave group followed the same pattern as the Indian press did in the previous few years. That is, to appeal directly to the socio-economic elite by persuading them of the benefits accrued through voting irrationally.
Narendra Modi has gone one step further; his recent demonetisation drive on the subcontinent was declared by the BJP in 2014 as “anti poor”, with commentators citing Modi’s criticism that the measure “will not address the problem of black money” (Uttam, 2016). Black money refers to money that leaves India and is stored in foreign bank accounts, historically Switzerland. However, in 2016 Narendra Modi announced that bank notes of the sum of 500 and 1000 rupees were to be demonetised within a short period of time. The BJP touted it as “a move towards a less cash dependent and more digitized society” (Govindarajan, 2017). The move was widely claimed to be part of a crackdown against organised crime, however can be viewed as an important test for the incumbent Prime Minister to how successfully he has maintained Indian trust in his ability to govern. This about turn capitalised on the Indian mistrust of the “metropolitan, well-heeled elite, who squirrel their money in hidden overseas bank accounts” (Mehta, 2017), but also combines this mistrust with a coordinated stated BJP policy of aiming to stop illicit activity with forged banknotes.
When we come to the 2014 election therefore, we can see that with the advent of fake news articles and pieces that deliberately encourage conspiracy rumours, Narendra Modi was in prime position to exploit the corruption rumours that had dogged the Indian National Congress Party and be catapulted to electoral success. I will now address how Modi managed to use social media far more adeptly than his opponents, and indeed contemporaries around the world. One must bear in mind that Modi at 63 was 20 years older than his Congress opponent, Rahul Gandhi, yet was able to outmanoeuvre him entirely through his efficient use of Twitter in particular. His personal brand on the website “straddles two spaces—a man who represents values and tradition and a man who represents globalized modernity” (Pal, 2015). This dual image is a significant part of how he was able to manipulate such a majority of the Indian electorate to endorse him. A combination of tweeting, whilst pictured in traditional dress appeals to both older and young generations in the sub-continent. What makes Narendra Modi’s choice to cultivate this brand online even more important is how early he decided to use it as a political platform. Prior to Barack Obama, hardly any major politicians had seriously sought to use social media as a form of boosting mass appeal, and translating online popularity to success at the voting polls. As early as 2012 however, Modi was already making use of Twitter in the lead to the national state elections. This included, for example, “a Google Hangout session with Bollywood actor Ajay Devgan on August 31, 2012” (Pal, 2015). The transition of Modi beginning to use the site as a vehicle for explosive political growth began early in 2014, where he exploited a photo opportunity with a film star from the Southern part of the country- an area traditionally more left wing than the rest of India, and this picture subsequently was viewed as “an endorsement from southern India”. Similar to Trump, and his interview with Jimmy Fallon which took place in September 2016, both Modi and Trump capitalised on the use of a platform with a well-liked and established media personality. This attempt to humanise and normalise the face of extremist politics is notable, as it undermines just criticism of the candidates (Britton, 2017).
Conclusion
That “post-truth” has recently been named the Oxford dictionary word of the year is hardly surprising, given the results of the British referendum to leave the European union, the electoral success of Donald Trump in the USA, and the global rise of populist movements that have gathered most pace in Europe. It seems unthinkable that an unashamed demagogue has won the most important and powerful leadership role in the world. As show in this essay, Trump ran on a platform of racism, outright misogyny, homophobia, and as a result tapped into the deepest fears of the majority of the American electorate. This is a fundamental characteristic of what defines “post-truth” politics as an entirely separate entity from mere political lies, or distortion of facts. As we can see from the elections examined in this dissertation, post-truth has emerged as a movement fuelled explosively through social media, where mistruths can be shared on a platform to millions in a matter of seconds. When considering the nature of “post-truth”, and the effects it has had in terms of manipulating the outcome of elections and influencing political debate, the narrative of the term has been applied consistently only to events that happen in either Europe or America. This has led to the assumption by those in Western European countries and the United States that post-truth is a new and western concept. However, as this essay has demonstrated, post-truth politics and the political climates that allow this phenomenon have existed in other parts of the world; including democracies, for far longer than the United States and Britain have been exposed to it.
We live in an era of unprecedented deviation from the truth. It is what has helped win elections, influence wars, and end political careers. This era of so called “post-truth” politics upon us is distinctly different from other periods of high distrust in politics characterised by the ease of access to false news articles, facilitated by social media such as Twitter and Facebook. During the course of writing this dissertation, my hypothesis was drastically altered as a result of the US presidential election. Whilst initially believing that the nadir of post-truth politics had been globally reached, Donald Trump then went on to defy all odds and claim victory in the Presidential election. My hypothesis was therefore proved wrong before even beginning the essay, and as a result I was forced to confront the possibility that the world had already been witness to post-truth politics in several other countries- a realisation that came to shape the backbone of my thesis . The thesis reflected how a Trump presidency can affect the course of upcoming general elections, and how the win by Trump was not entirely unexpected or unpredictable given the rise of populism globally and the powerful tool of social media that helps to create and condition an electorate for a post-truth environment.
Introduction
It is hardly a new and radical concept that politicians lie, particularly during important national elections. Therefore, my biggest challenge in writing the dissertation initially was to be able to critically distinguish between a lie in politics, versus a “post-truth” lie. The thesis will go on to state how and what the explicit difference between the two are, along with other terms that follow such as “post-truth era” and “post-truth society”.
The term “post-truth” is itself a modern term in western political discourse; it only made an appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, where it was named word of the year due to its sudden surge following Brexit. Casper Grathwohl, the President of the OED was quoted in late 2016 saying “given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time”, (Flood, 2016). This is in reference only to Britain and the United States however, where post-truth was acknowledged after other parts of the world had experienced it.
The most pressing issue of recent international politics is arguably the rise of the far right not just in Europe and America, but worldwide. This essay will focus on the provenance of this upsurge of populist rhetoric to enter the political discourse, and how it has affected electorates and elections. An obvious criticism of the word “post-truth” is that the term is simply irrelevant if we are to assume that politics and lies are inextricably linked. At which point does one determine where post-truth politics was created? One might argue it was employed as early as the Second World War during the mass propaganda that was employed by both allied and axis powers. Through the course of this essay, I will seek to establish that post-truth politics can only exist within a post-truth society. Whilst the Western press has only recently coined the term “post-truth”, and a debate exists over whether to even recognise the term as new, we must consider an altogether different possibility. That is, that post-truth society is not a western phenomenon as recent opinion pieces make it appear. In this essay, a key theme that I will link to the rise of post-truth politics in Western elections is the prevalence with which it has already been appearing in other countries already.
As case studies, I have decided to use the Indian General Election of 2014, and the Israeli elections in 2015 because these two elections demonstrate how populist movements have been gaining pace in other parts of the world. I will provide further context of the societies of the two countries as it is crucial to understand how Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Modi managed to win these elections. I believe it was a telltale sign for how Western candidates adopted their strategies in order to win elections such as the British referendum on EU membership and the US presidential election. The focus of my research will therefore be not only on Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign, but also on the aforementioned national elections and events of political significance leading up to them. This will allow a nuanced frame of reference to two other democracies in other parts of the world that have already been exposed to post-truth politics long before Britain and the United States were. This is in line with my thesis, which is that the advent of Post-Truth politics the UK, Europe and the United States are facing was in fact predictable if we looked further afield to parts of the world where the seeds had already been sown for a post-truth society. The Israeli and Indian elections are significant because both countries are democratic, however specifically chose a political path that they knowingly acknowledged might lead to increased autocratic politics. An example is the unprecedented number of public roles Netanyahu has assumed- in addition to the premiership, Netanyahu also serves as foreign minister, communications minister, economy minister and regional development minister. The proliferation of social media is a crucial element in perpetuating the spread of post-truth politics, with websites Facebook and Twitter allowing the rise of fake news articles that the sites refused to take down due to freedom of expression policies. This has therefore allowed the spread of misinformation even in democracies, a feat only previously achieved through an authoritarian state’s control of media.
A brief introduction of “Post-Truth Politics”
In terms of using classical political theory as a guide for how post-truth societies emerge, one has to look no further than Plato’s allegory of the cave for an example of how a society can be deceived easily to believe a mis-truth. Noted political theorist Hannah Arendt states, “he who forced his fellow citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehoods and illusion was in danger of his life” (Grosch, 2008). We can see that in the allegory of the cave, Plato highlights that the appeal of holding to an incorrect belief is stronger than being presented with the evidence that the cave is merely a shadow of the real world. If we apply this allegorical tale to modern politics, we might draw comparisons between the cave-dwellers Plato described, and the populaces of a post-truth society. Post-truth politics requires a rejection of facts, and a group of individuals to collectively embrace partial truths or complete lies. The lies are likely to appeal to populist sentiment, and emotion rather than offering any concrete evidence or fact- the exact definition of post-truth being “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016).
Now we come to the fundamental difference between a lie in politics, and a post-truth lie. I will address this in the introduction as it important to distinguish early on before the case studies what makes “post-truth” so different. A lie in politics is for example Bill Clinton lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky with the infamous quote “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”. This was quickly deduced to be a lie with evidence and testimonials- in this example, a federal grand jury investigating and leading to impeachment proceedings. A post-truth lie is far more subtle, and insidious. Let us take the example of the claim during the lead-up to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, that £350 million a week is sent to the EU from Britain. This claim originated on Twitter, and had gathered so much traction by the date of the referendum that 47% of the British public believed this claim to be true (Ipsos MORI, 2016). The further claim by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson that this sum could then be used to increase government funding to the NHS was a major factor in determining the outcome of the referendum. This figure was discredited by the BBC, Channel 4 News, and Full Fact- yet the Leave campaign continued to cite this figure despite the overwhelming evidence that it was false. More recently, the London Economic publication uncovered an essay composed by the director of the Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, who wrote “Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no” (Peat, 2017). This admission is of huge national significance, as it suggests one simple lie regarding Britain’s EU fees per week shaped the outcome of out referendum. We can see therefore, that a major defining feature of a post-truth lie is its continuity despite being contradicted by evidence-based counter claims. When a regular political lie is exposed as false, such as that of Bill Clinton’s, the disseminator of this false information retracts the statement or apologises with an admission of guilt and the subsequent truth is uncovered. A post-truth lie is repeated- which has the effect of the veracity of the claim being forgotten as people focus on the sensationalism of the statement rather than if it is truthful or not. An example of this might be the so-called “birther movement”, started by Donald Trump in 2011 regarding the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and widely seen as a test run for the later outrageous post-truth campaign he would craft.
“Post-truth” has recently been named the Oxford dictionary word of the year. This is hardly surprising, given the results of the British referendum to leave the European union, the electoral success of Donald Trump in the USA, and the global rise of populist movements that have gathered most pace in Europe. It seems unthinkable that an unashamed demagogue has won the most important and powerful leadership role in the world. Trump ran on a platform of racism, outright misogyny, homophobic undertones, and as a result tapped into the deepest fears of the majority of the American electorate. This is a fundamental characteristic of what defines “post-truth” politics as an entirely separate entity from mere political lies, or distortion of facts. It has emerged as a movement fuelled explosively through social media, where mistruths can be shared on a platform to millions in a matter of seconds.
The United States Presidential Election 2016, and the success of Trump
After having concretely decided upon the focus and research of my dissertation in early September, I had formulated the thesis that Donald Trump’s expected defeat in the presidential elections of 2016 would mark the end of a post-truth narrative that seemed to have gripped Britain and other parts of the world in populist movements. After the results of the election, I altered my thesis to reflect the devastating effects post-truth rhetoric has had on the outcome of democratic elections. I will therefore begin my first case study analysis on the campaign and subsequent behaviour of Donald Trump as he wages a war against the mainstream media in the United States. The nature of post-truth politics is inextricably linked to identity politics- in particular, race has been the predominant defining feature of the most significant recent election results. Donald Trump’s claims to “build the wall”, painting Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals have exposed the deep racial divides in the United States. On balance, this has had an epistemological effect on the population centres where large numbers of latinos reside, such as parts of Texas and New Mexico, where immigrants from Latin America have entered legally but still are treated with the suspicion and sometimes violence usually only reserved for illegal immigrants. Most troubling however are the recent statistics documenting violence against Muslim Americans. Research from the FBI and PEW statistics show that levels of anti-Muslim assault are at their highest levels since the September 11th attacks (Kishi, 2016). This attempt at “othering” is a feature of post-truth politics whereby Trump has tapped into existing fears of immigration, and combined it with a radical and controversial solution in the form of “building the wall”.
An issue that has been brushed under the carpet in light of the shocking result of the United States’ election is the role that the mainstream media played in advancing the popularity and screen-time of Donald Trump. In the early stages of the election, CNN broadcast Trump’s speeches without political commentary. This is unprecedented for an election of such importance, and is compounded by the fact that CNN has a markedly liberal leaning. Not only did this allow right-wing press to dominate the political debate and criticise the Clinton campaign for refusing to address the deleted emails scandal (Jose a. DelReal, Washington Post), but it gave Trump a nationwide television platform with unbridled access to launch attacks on Clinton that were not criticised or commented upon by members of the American press for the beginning of the race between the two candidates.
Politico magazine aptly points out that “Trump artfully created the media that in turn created Trump the presidential candidate” (Shafer, 2016). Whilst I am skeptical of the theme of this article claiming that the American media ought to exonerate themselves despite having empowered Donald Trump, and effectively paving his way to the White House, the article at least raises the important point that Trump is a master at generating controversy; and thus headlines. Incendiary remarks make successful news in a society where information is available 24 hours a day, and where newspapers are forced to consider printing ever more sensational stories in order to keep up with fast-paced platforms such as Twitter. The temptation to run ever increasingly sensationalist stories was made abundantly clear in the US election cycle. A notable example of this that concerns race in particular is Trump’s explicit remarks concerning a nationwide blanket ban on “Muslims entering the United States” (Trump, 2016). This galvanised Trump’s supporters to the extent that in the aftermath of the election, race hate crime rocketed against “Muslims, Hispanic Americans, black people, ethnic minorities and the LGBT community” (Dearden, 2016), which corresponds highly with the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s statistics that in the first month after Trump’s victory “1064 race hate incidents occurred” (Slate, 2017). In an attempt to back-pedal after he had implemented the ban through executive order, and distance the White House from the surge in hate crime, Trump tweeted “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe” (Nguyen, 2016), in reference to the ban which had imposed a blanket travel restriction on seven Muslim majority countries for 90 days (Rothwell & Kroll). The statistics by the Southern Poverty law Centre correlate strongly with data collected in the United Kingdom following the Brexit referendum. This recorded that just one day after the referendum, hate crime had soared by 42% in England and Wales (Mortimer, 2016). This statistic will be addressed in the Brexit case study, and will elaborate on the post-truth connection between the US race hate statistics versus that of the UK.
Research undertaken by linguistic and sociological scholars on Donald Trump’s discourse find that his language patterns are inconsistent with other Republican candidates who posed a threat to him early in the Republican national campaigns. This is a feature of post-truth as a populist candidate is more likely to change their speed depending on the constituency. This correlates with other research undertaken by scholars on populism, who posit that the discourse of right-wing populist parties “depends on the nature of their constituency: The style is adapted to fit the needs of the heartland” (Albertazzi, 2007). Trump adapted his speeches throughout his campaign depending on location, in many cases matching political theatric to the sentiments of localities. This populist tactic is typical of post-truth, and was seen notably during the Leave campaign of Brexit. “Grandiosity” is a feature of such speeches, where adjectives relating to size (“big, huge” etc) and beauty (“beautiful, elegant” etc) are used frequently in political speeches- adjectives that were extensively used throughout the Trump campaign to describe the proposed border wall with Mexico (Earle, 2017). Despite the sensationalism of these claims, major public broadcasters in the United States between August-September 2016 dedicated far more screen time to Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This correlates with the theories by which right-wing populists are able to gain a following, where “to appear effective and legitimate, right-wing populist party leaders need the media as a platform” (Bos et al, 2011). The danger of a media doesn’t “prioritize issues of profound importance” (Fateh, 2016), is that it oxygenates controversial statements and allows them to be normalised. This is not unique to a political environment- for example, it can be examined through a corporate lens as well. Shareholders are more likely to respond to “strong-man” language with a focus on grandiosity and “destructive narcissism”, involving the word “I” and “my” more often than usual (Craig & Amernic, 2011). On use of first person pronouns, Trump also ranked highest- and significantly higher than the mean of the other eight Republican candidates(Ahmadian et al, 2016). As a result, Donald Trump was given undue influence in the political debate in the lead up to the election through major news outlets seeking to capitalise on his outrageous statements without offering critiques and counter-arguments from the other candidates. Trump’s influence is compounded by the prolific rate at which he tweets- dozens of times a day in the final months to the election. Political linguist analysts have noted that Twitter in particular due to its condensed form of communication is defined by three key features: simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility (Ott, 2016). This tendency towards a “mean” tweet therefore is similar to generating controversy that news channels clamour to air. As a result, Trump had the perfect balance of the endorsements from major news channels that allowed an air of credibility to be formed around him, combined with the informality of reaching millions of people directly through the medium of Twitter. Given that Twitter structurally disallows the communication of detailed and sophisticated messages (Ott, 2016), it is difficult to formulate a counter-argument to the content of the tweet in a way that will receive the same exposure as the original tweet. Trump capitalises on this by refusing to address inconsistencies that are pointed out in his tweets. Most recently, following the dismissal of the FBI chief James Comey, Trump tweeted “Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!” (Trump, 2017). This tweet in particular correlates with the aforementioned findings concerning grandiosity and narcissistic speech patterns, with a claim firstly that is purposefully vague and difficult to verify, along with the trademark statement that suggests superiority of knowledge and recommendation of deference to the President.
On balance therefore, we can see Trump mastered the art of post-truth through mixing legitimacy gained through the mainstream media endorsing him indirectly, combined with is ability to disregard political precedents set in the United States and attack Clinton and the opponents directly on Twitter. This “infotainment” allowed ordinary users in the periphery of political engagement to feel more included as a result (Bos et al, 2011), similar to how Narendra Modi has used his social media prowess to target disaffected members of Indian society. This will be examined in the Indian case study for a nuanced comparison of how world leaders use Twitter as an effective vehicle.
Case Study- Israel’s post-truth society and the 2015 General Election
The Israeli General Election of 2015 arguably demonstrated features of Israeli society having made the transition into a post-truth one. This particular Israeli election is an important political litmus to measure the scale of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump against another populist candidate, in the form of Benjamin Netanyahu. This case study will attempt to analyse how the Israeli General Election is a useful example of how post-truth rhetoric and populist policies led to the re-election of the incumbent Prime Minister, and how the Israeli elections could have served as a warning and sign of the inevitability of populism that would come to shape both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For this case study, I was able to interview a renowned Israeli journalist at Haaretz, Israel’s leading English newspaper. Due to concerns over political sensitivities and possible recriminations from far-right groups, I have chosen to omit the journalists name from the dissertation, however they provided me with valuable insight and statistics into how Israelis voted in 2015 as a result of populist policies touted by Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and by the conditioning of the Israeli electorate beforehand into becoming a post-truth society.
The case of Israel is unique- as a country that sits in a hostile geopolitical region with regular threats directed towards the state, it has developed a society that is modelled around a permanent state of readiness and preparedness for armed conflict. This is simply accepted as fact, and politicians across the Israeli spectrum insist that the country must always preserve the right to pre-emptive strikes. For example, the latest war that Israel engaged in with Gaza in 2014 was initiated on the claim that Hamas had kidnapped three Israeli hikers and murdered them. No evidence was put forth for this wildly inflammatory claim, and Israel responded heavy handedly with artillery strikes as soon as Hamas began to fire rockets. This suggests that Israel was simply waiting for a timely excuse to attack the Gaza strip, a theory endorsed by the Jewish Daily Forward with “Journalists who heard rumors [about the emergency call] were told the Shin Bet wanted the gag order on the deaths to aid the search. For public consumption, the official word was that Israel was 'acting on the assumption that they’re [the hikers] alive.' It was, simply put, a lie,” (Goldberg, 2014). This clearly shows that the Shin Bet (Israel’s elite ministry of interior intelligence) knew prior to the conflict that the Israelis were dead- but still had no evidence to suggest Hamas was behind the kidnappings. Al Jazeera’s investigations corroborate with these claims, and they reported that “A two-year inquiry into the 2014 Gaza war by Israel's official watchdog has found that the government failed to explore diplomatic solutions to prevent the seven-week conflict”. For direct criticism to be levelled at the Israeli government by an Israeli institution is rare in itself, but the report detailed that Netanyahu was personally at fault due to failing to alert the cabinet that a system of tunnels posed a “strategic threat” (Al Jazeera, 2017) to Israel. What is surprising is that the internal investigation took so long to publish- with minimal outcry from the Israeli public. This might be helped by the fact that the Israeli Army is the most trusted institution in the country- well ahead of academic and political institutions. The word of the Israeli Defence Force therefore, is highly trusted with 82% of Israelis ranking them in first place- dwarfing the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) which comes in second to last place with 38% (Times of Israel Staff, 2016). Therefore, we can establish that the Israeli public is more willing to believe the IDF over the Israeli government. As a result, the Israeli public is willing to believe IDF spokespersons, when they comment on situations such as that of the escalating tensions in Gaza, and the need for Israeli intervention. Amongst the most shocking claims the IDF made during the course of the 2014 Gaza War, is that Hamas used Palestinian civilians as “human shields”. This sensational claim that originated from the IDF was entirely debunked in an independent UN fact-finding mission, which stated “A number of incidents, along with the high number of civilian deaths, belies the [Israeli] claim that all necessary precautions are being taken to protect civilian lives.” (Hasan, 2014). What makes the Israeli claim even more incredible is that Israel has allegedly used Palestinians as human shields during operations conducted in Gaza- “Israeli soldiers used an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield, forcing him to walk in front of them at gunpoint and enter potentially booby-trapped buildings to check for explosives.” (Khalek, 2014), with the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights endorsing this claim. This is a feature that distinguishes a post-truth lie from a political lie- Arab publications have noted that combining “ ‘human shields’ with ‘legitimacy,’ the equation for blatant misrepresentation is perfect” (Wadi, 2014). Yet, despite this overwhelming evidence debunking the “human shield” claim to account for the extremely high Palestinian civilian casualties in the 2014 war- 1,492 (Zonszein, 2015), the majority of Israelis and a large number of Americans believe the claims that Hamas uses human shields. The claim is further diminished when considering incidents such as four children being killed on Gaza’s beach in an Israeli shelling, witnessed by many foreign journalists. This was another supposed example of combatants using “human shields”, yet there were no combatants from Hamas present on the beach. Human Rights Watch described the attack as “unlawful” (Speri, 2014), and criticised the IDF for claiming shelling was a form of precision attack. Similar to the Indian style of post-truth politics, what the IDF has successfully done is blend an existing false story that resonates with the Israeli electorate (human shields), and combined it with the claim that the IDF only uses precision guided weapons to combat Palestinians.
As a result, the Israeli public and others abroad who air the claims as well are conditioned into believing that the innocent bystanders are somehow implicated in acts against the state of Israel, as they would surely not have been killed by “precision weapons” unless they were a combatant or very close to one. This is analysed in studies of Israeli public policy during times of war, where organisations dedicated to “Hasbara”, or public diplomacy, attempt to influence the narrative of events to favour the state of Israel. The Jerusalem Post provided an in-depth analysis of Israel’s attempts to influence the dialogue, and wrote “The purpose of the campaign, the official said, is to show the context to the suffering in Gaza, and to show that Hamas is “sacrificing its people on the altar of its radical ideology.” (Keinon, 2014). This slick media campaign, which the IDF conducts on Twitter, is part of what Arab scholars have termed the “Hasbara 2.0”. It started in 2010, when the IDF simultaneously set up accounts for blogging, Twitter, and YouTube (Aouragh, 2016), immediately following the international outcry following the Gaza flotilla raid where 10 Turkish activists were murdered in “international waters, 130km from the Israeli coast” (BBC, 2016). The IDF thought it imperative to join Twitter in order to limit brand damage both domestically and internationally in the wake of the attacks, condemned as illegal by the United Nations and calling for the Gaza blockade to be lifted (Ban Ki-Moon, 2010). Despite the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish humanitarian vessel happening in international waters, Israel faced no legal punishment from the international community partly due to the strength of its foreign ministry in repeating the phrase “the state has a right to defend itself”. This success of the Israeli government in promoting its narrative abroad was reflected upon by noted political theorist Edward Said, who pointed out that “Palestinians really have few, if any positive connotations. They are almost completely dehumanised”.
Now I have established clearly that there is strong evidence to suggest a climate of chronic political mistruth already existed in Israel, I will examine the effect that post-truth media in Israel has had on the most recent election. Statistics from the 2015 election show that it was the most well-attended election since 1999, with voter turnout up almost 5% from the previous election at 72% (Atmor & Friedberg, 2016). There is an historic trend in Israeli society that poorer voters, who tend to be Arabs living in rural Arab-Israeli towns, turn out at the polls far less than Jewish voters- particularly those in the large metropolitan areas of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Amor & Friedberg in their sociological analysis of the election noted that geographical locations correlated greatly with voter turnout, stating that “engagement in geographic peripheries act as a metaphor for citizens being on the periphery of political engagement”. The findings of these Israeli scholars’ correlates with political patterns worldwide- that the politics of poverty ensures poorer members of society are more likely to be disenfranchised partly or totally. To some extent, this correlates with the ballot effects in the US where without a high-school diploma, poor children are four times more likely than their college-educated peers to be unemployed and “10 to 20 times more likely to end up behind bars”, (Weeks, 2014). This is compounded by the fact that felons in the United States convicted of a felony are barred from voting for some period of time in all but two states (data from the NonProfit Vote Org). As a result, we can see that poverty plays a significant role in electoral patterns worldwide. In the 2015 Israeli election, this was no different- with areas of higher poverty in the South of the country registering 10% below the national voting average in the general election. However, the research also pointed out that in certain parts of the country, voter turnout was the highest it had ever been in an election- over 10% higher than the 2015 national voter turnout at 83%. The localities that these high results occurred in had one specific feature in common, which is that they all compose extremely religious members of Israel’s Jewish nationalist population. This discrepancy of 20% between the poorer Arab neighbourhoods, versus the very religious Jewish population centres can be explained by the post-truth rhetoric that Netanyahu’s Likud Party churned out in the final days of the election. In what was seen as an attempt to galvanise his rightist base during the 2015 election, Netanyahu had warned on Election Day in March 2015 that “Arab voters are going in droves to the polls” with the help of “left-wing” activists (Times of Israel, 2016). He went on to state in the same video that high turnout by Arab voters was “putting right-wing rule in danger” (Netanyahu, 2015). This is of critical importance given the timing at which Netanyahu delivered the comments, perceived globally as causing deep divides n the fractious elections where the Arab coalition formed against his Likud party were gaining more votes than in any previous election. The video was released on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and clearly had an effect in the religious Jewish localities when Netanyahu threatened explicitly that his right-wing government was being seriously challenged by the joint list opposition parties. Netanyahu claimed in the same video that Arab voters were being “bussed into the polls by left-wing NGOs”. This is another example of a post-truth lie; it capitalises on the fear of Arabs dominating the Jewish Israeli electorate at the voting booths, and also taps into the fear and distrust the Likud Party has manufactured against left-leaning NGOs in Israel that they claim are “foreign funded” (Shaked, 2015).
The British Referendum on EU membership 2016
In June 2016, all polling suggested that the British referendum on membership of the European Union would be comfortably to remain in the union. When the referendum was won with 52% of people voting to leave the Eu however, this marked the first significant moment in British electoral history that opinion polls, projected exit polls, and experts on psychological voting patterns were proved wrong. Just as the case studies aforementioned in the United States, India and Israel, the campaign to leave the EU was won primarily through deceit and the extensive use of post-truth statements and false facts.
The biggest exposed lies of Brexit that this dissertation has already mentioned is the claim that Britain sends 350million a week to the EU, and the further claim by Nigel Farage that this sum could be used to fund NHS short-falls. Despite the claim being directed and disproved conclusively after the referendum, no polls have been conducted as to how this major lie affected the outcome of the vote, which was claimed to be 50/50 in the week leading up to the election (Kirk 2017). However, the Advertising Standards Agency have stated that the Leave campaign is immune from prosecution due to political advertising being exempted from ASA regulation. As a result consumers are protected form corporations, “but you can claim that £350m a week will go to the NHS instead of the European Union” (Lewis, 2016). This corresponds with Kings College London’s research into the referendum which states that the “UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning” (Moore, 2016). In the face of post-truth rhetoric, the Guardian refers to the democratic vote as a “train robbery” (Cadwalladr, 2017), whereby the democratic vote was hijacked by the Leave campaign and their donors through the spread of misinformation on Twitter. There is current debate over whether there was undue influence through the use of automated bots that posted Pro-Leave messages on Twitter. Twitter hashtags, keywords that pertain to a popular topic (Sankaranarayanan et al, 2009), are a key post-truth tool that were potentially used very effectively by the Leave campaign, unbeknownst to the Remain campaign. That is, that most “instances of #brexit still accompany messages about leaving the EU. The second most popular #brexit hashtag (#voteleave) is still used three times more than the most frequent encouraging membership (#StrongerIn)” (Howard & Kollanyi, 2017). This suggests a purposeful obfuscation of the debate through the Leave campaign actively encouraging the use of the hashtag “VoteLeave”.
Theresa May posited that the economic arguments for remaining in the EU were significant, and told a gathering at Goldman Sachs “I think the economic arguments are clear. I think being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe” (May, 2017). Theresa May expressly tried to appeal to the public to stay in the EU, however performed a swift about turn on her opinion when the referendum was over. May’s attempts to persuade the British public that Brexit can be “made a success of” is a notable example of post-truth politics- “Now she is loudly and proudly following a policy she does not believe in, and following the most extreme version of that policy anyone can imagine” (Cohen, 2017). This total U-turn corresponds with Swastika Mehta’s theory of the “zeal of the political convert”, whereby in a post-truth environment the most important politicians and leaders of parties pander to the most popular policies, even if it means contradicting their earlier beliefs entirely.
Case Study- the Indian General Election 2014
The Indian national elections of 2014 were a sweeping victory for the party of Hindu nationalism, Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP. The election was such a success in fact that the BJP is the first single-party government, in a country usually governed by coalitions, since 1984. Their victory saw the Indian National Congress party defeated so heavily, that they only won 44 seats out of 545 in India’s lower house of parliament. This figure is so low that it does not even reach the minimum amount of 10% to be considered India’s opposition party, meaning the country since the election has not had an official opposition party according to the Press Information Bureau of India in 2014. The election was characterised by the BJP levelling numerous claims of corruption against the governing Congress party, and stirring up populist sentiment by accusing the Congress Party of acting “dynastically”, with members of the Nehru-Gandhi family handing down power as a familial tradition. This had the effect of stirring anti-Congress sentiment in favour of Narendra Modi, a candidate who emphasised his humble origins and policies of Hindu nationalism, his history reported by Al Jazeera as “At eight, Modi associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the RSS, a powerful Hindu nationalist group which rejected secularism”. This stood in stark contrast to Rahul Gandhi, the current scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, a family that has been in charge of India for 40 of the 70 years since the country gained independence.
The Western elections that I have so far focussed on; the US Presidential election and Brexit, show that post-truth is a relatively new feature of Western political discourse. This case study will demonstrate how post-truth has existed in India for decades- perhaps even longer, and that there are conspicuous similarities between how the Indian public was conditioned to accepting post-truth lies in a similar way the American and British public have been more recently. Parallels between India’s tumultuous election cycle, filled with post-truth lies, versus that of the United States’ election first started to be noticed by the US Press only after Donald Trump had been elected. Ranjit Goswami of US News notes “India’s post-truth era cannot be traced to a single year – its complexities go back generations. But the election of Narendra Modi in 2014 can be marked as a significant inflection point” (Goswami, 2017). Let us take a sensationalist example, that the BJP continues to perpetuate today; the case of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, who the BJP has repeatedly claimed is a recipient of CIA funding. The most recent quote from an Indian tabloid regarding the matter is “the NGO Kejriwal ran while being a member of the Indian Revenue Services, was funded by the Ford Foundation, which in turn was supported by the CIA” (Sehgal, 2016). The article goes on to state that these are allegations, but makes no reference to the source of the allegations, and continues to repeat them throughout. What is more bizarre is that the article then goes on to list a minor tax infraction that Kejriwal committed- “he was forced to repay Rs 9.2 lakhs by income tax department, which he had cheated off” (Sehgal, 2016). As a result, we can see this article has attracted attention through a sensationalist headline, but then dotted the article with smaller anecdotes of Kejriwal’s untruthfulness and character. This corresponds highly with the theories presented by Grzegorz Kolodko, who posits that the media will often behave in a manner intended to frighten politicians to maintain their monopoly in dictating political discourse- “the criticism may be ideological and it may be personal. Its true intent is always camouflaged” (Kolodko, 2008). This is a prime example of drawing to attention a relatively minor offence of tax evasion through the reputation of a post-truth claim, that Kejriwal is in some manner connected with the American Central Intelligence Agency. Furthermore, the claim focuses on a long-held belief by the Indian public that back-channel operations and restrictions by the CIA and Mi6 play a part in hindering India’s own covert actions, such as the pre-emptive attack against Pakistani militants who were planning terror attacks against India, widely referred to as “surgical strikes” in mainstream Indian media. What we have therefore in the case if India, is a subtle blend of a post-truth lie using repetition of a mistruth, combined with a historic anti-CIA sentiment that is specific to India. The result is a highly negative attitude of the Indian public towards Kejriwal, with his approval rating dropping from 60% to 50% as the story continues to be spread about his alleged links to the CIA (Chaudhuri, 2016). After having researched the role of the CIA and Mi6 in Indian affairs regarding national security, I was able to discover that there is indeed some truth to the fact that the CIA has some interest in the Indo-Pakistan border, but to what extent the CIA meddles in Indian affairs is another matter. What is important to the discussion of Indian post-truth politics is how fact and fiction are intertwined in slick campaigns such as that run by the BJP media team. Apparently “until 1993-94, the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) literally forbade the RAW from launching covert operations in Pakistan” (Nandy, 2016). This statement is extremely hard to verify due to the tradition of national defence ministries refusing to comment on clandestine operations, however it is a prime example of how post-truth stories are given mainstream platforms. The claim is an attempt to frame the CIA of undermining Indian sovereignty in hindering its ability to strike back against Pakistan, however Chandan Nundy does not point out in his opinion piece that cross-border clandestine activity is illegal for all states under international law. This is consistent with the Berkeley La Raza Journal of Law, which states “the aggressor opens itself up to international law”. As we can see, the Indian media has produced a cascade of interlinking pieces that dubiously connect Arvind Kejriwal first to the CIA, and then connect the CIA to India’s inability to strike back against Pakistani militants across the border. Swastika Mehta of NDTV, India’s largest English-speaking news channel, told me in our interview “I believe this entire slew of negative media articles directed against Kejriwal is a co-ordinated media witch hunt instigated personally by the Prime Minister and the media wing of the BJP, attempting to discredit his Aam Aadmi party” (Mehta, 2017). Furthermore, Mehta points out that the slew of articles she describes is all in English. This is hugely important, as it suggests the creator of this false content is aiming at a specific audience in India- the middle and upper-middle classes who speak English fluently. This correlates with middle-class disaffection towards the political process in older democracies. The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media conducted multiple studies on disaffection and negativism, and concluded that “Specifically, negativism appears to be a double-edged sword, with active media use an important intervening variable” (Pinkleton, 1998). As a result, the post-truth climate has encouraged the Indian media to produce articles for the Indian middle-classes as their disaffection ironically makes them more interested in the political process by reading negative articles pertaining to individuals or opposition parties. This further corresponds with the theories Pankaj Mishra posits in his forthcoming book, where he states “Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new ‘irrationalism’ through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism” (Mishra, 2017). The tying of “irrationalism” to the political elite is a trend that is not unique to the Indian example however; we can see that the biggest lies told during the Brexit campaign by the Leave group followed the same pattern as the Indian press did in the previous few years. That is, to appeal directly to the socio-economic elite by persuading them of the benefits accrued through voting irrationally.
Narendra Modi has gone one step further; his recent demonetisation drive on the subcontinent was declared by the BJP in 2014 as “anti poor”, with commentators citing Modi’s criticism that the measure “will not address the problem of black money” (Uttam, 2016). Black money refers to money that leaves India and is stored in foreign bank accounts, historically Switzerland. However, in 2016 Narendra Modi announced that bank notes of the sum of 500 and 1000 rupees were to be demonetised within a short period of time. The BJP touted it as “a move towards a less cash dependent and more digitized society” (Govindarajan, 2017). The move was widely claimed to be part of a crackdown against organised crime, however can be viewed as an important test for the incumbent Prime Minister to how successfully he has maintained Indian trust in his ability to govern. This about turn capitalised on the Indian mistrust of the “metropolitan, well-heeled elite, who squirrel their money in hidden overseas bank accounts” (Mehta, 2017), but also combines this mistrust with a coordinated stated BJP policy of aiming to stop illicit activity with forged banknotes.
When we come to the 2014 election therefore, we can see that with the advent of fake news articles and pieces that deliberately encourage conspiracy rumours, Narendra Modi was in prime position to exploit the corruption rumours that had dogged the Indian National Congress Party and be catapulted to electoral success. I will now address how Modi managed to use social media far more adeptly than his opponents, and indeed contemporaries around the world. One must bear in mind that Modi at 63 was 20 years older than his Congress opponent, Rahul Gandhi, yet was able to outmanoeuvre him entirely through his efficient use of Twitter in particular. His personal brand on the website “straddles two spaces—a man who represents values and tradition and a man who represents globalized modernity” (Pal, 2015). This dual image is a significant part of how he was able to manipulate such a majority of the Indian electorate to endorse him. A combination of tweeting, whilst pictured in traditional dress appeals to both older and young generations in the sub-continent. What makes Narendra Modi’s choice to cultivate this brand online even more important is how early he decided to use it as a political platform. Prior to Barack Obama, hardly any major politicians had seriously sought to use social media as a form of boosting mass appeal, and translating online popularity to success at the voting polls. As early as 2012 however, Modi was already making use of Twitter in the lead to the national state elections. This included, for example, “a Google Hangout session with Bollywood actor Ajay Devgan on August 31, 2012” (Pal, 2015). The transition of Modi beginning to use the site as a vehicle for explosive political growth began early in 2014, where he exploited a photo opportunity with a film star from the Southern part of the country- an area traditionally more left wing than the rest of India, and this picture subsequently was viewed as “an endorsement from southern India”. Similar to Trump, and his interview with Jimmy Fallon which took place in September 2016, both Modi and Trump capitalised on the use of a platform with a well-liked and established media personality. This attempt to humanise and normalise the face of extremist politics is notable, as it undermines just criticism of the candidates (Britton, 2017).
Conclusion
That “post-truth” has recently been named the Oxford dictionary word of the year is hardly surprising, given the results of the British referendum to leave the European union, the electoral success of Donald Trump in the USA, and the global rise of populist movements that have gathered most pace in Europe. It seems unthinkable that an unashamed demagogue has won the most important and powerful leadership role in the world. As show in this essay, Trump ran on a platform of racism, outright misogyny, homophobia, and as a result tapped into the deepest fears of the majority of the American electorate. This is a fundamental characteristic of what defines “post-truth” politics as an entirely separate entity from mere political lies, or distortion of facts. As we can see from the elections examined in this dissertation, post-truth has emerged as a movement fuelled explosively through social media, where mistruths can be shared on a platform to millions in a matter of seconds. When considering the nature of “post-truth”, and the effects it has had in terms of manipulating the outcome of elections and influencing political debate, the narrative of the term has been applied consistently only to events that happen in either Europe or America. This has led to the assumption by those in Western European countries and the United States that post-truth is a new and western concept. However, as this essay has demonstrated, post-truth politics and the political climates that allow this phenomenon have existed in other parts of the world; including democracies, for far longer than the United States and Britain have been exposed to it.
We live in an era of unprecedented deviation from the truth. It is what has helped win elections, influence wars, and end political careers. This era of so called “post-truth” politics upon us is distinctly different from other periods of high distrust in politics characterised by the ease of access to false news articles, facilitated by social media such as Twitter and Facebook. During the course of writing this dissertation, my hypothesis was drastically altered as a result of the US presidential election. Whilst initially believing that the nadir of post-truth politics had been globally reached, Donald Trump then went on to defy all odds and claim victory in the Presidential election. My hypothesis was therefore proved wrong before even beginning the essay, and as a result I was forced to confront the possibility that the world had already been witness to post-truth politics in several other countries- a realisation that came to shape the backbone of my thesis . The thesis reflected how a Trump presidency can affect the course of upcoming general elections, and how the win by Trump was not entirely unexpected or unpredictable given the rise of populism globally and the powerful tool of social media that helps to create and condition an electorate for a post-truth environment.
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