The Oxford English Dictionary picks a word of the year every year. This year it has chosen “post- truth”, defined as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which the objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to the emotions and personal beliefs”. This obviously relates to Brexit and the American election. Usually the dictionary teams in the UK and the USA pick different words, but this year they both chose the same word.
Sad, isn’t it? We were (are) bombarded with stuff that is blatantly misleading, derogatory and untrue, and people believe it because they are ready and willing to believe it, such is the division and anger stalking both countries.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a point. I never expect politicians to be fully truthful- at the very least, they will present the facts in ways that suits them, we all do that to an extent. But 2016 has seen lying on an industrial scale become the norm. A contributing factor to post-truth politics is the rise of populism, which I define as any political movement that claims to speak for all ordinary people against an elite. Trump talked about a (non-existent) silent majority that supported him. Similarly, Leave spokesmen claimed to speak on behalf of the people against a ‘metropolitan liberal elite.’ Since when did 48% of the population constitute an elite I have no idea. But the framing of politics into people vs elites only polarises the debate. Instead, politicians should be honest and admit that they only speak for a select few. I fully admit that I’m very out of touch and unrepresentative of the population: upper middle class students from the Home Counties attending Russell Group universities are hardly a cross section of wider society.