Post-Truth Populism and the Decline of the Public Sphere

This paper investigates the interaction between populism and the post-truth political condition and evaluates their impact on the public sphere. We see, particularly right-wing, populism as both cause and symptom of the post-truth condition – where mis-/disinformation is deliberately propagated by populists as a way of sowing mistrust in the political ‘establishment’ and the mainstream media, which is accused of ‘fake news’. This is a strategy pursued by populist politicians and movements in order to galvanize political constituencies, shape the political agenda and to win power. Furthermore, the growing prominence of populism is itself made possible through a general decline of trust in traditional sources of information - particularly public and scientific bodies. We show that this convergence between populism and post-truth has a corrosive effect on the public sphere - referring to the space of relatively free, public communication between citizens out from which democratic will formation is said to emerge. We argue that populism - in fueling affective polarization (‚culture wars‘) - undermines the public sphere, making genuine deliberation between citizens increasingly difficult and producing in its place a fragmented space of echo chambers. After diagnosing this problem, we show how the public sphere might be reclaimed through institutional measures, new forms of democratic activism, and by promoting spaces for civilised debate and a genuine respect for pluralism as the values central to liberal democracy. Building on findings of our Horizon Europe project "RECLAIM-Reclaiming democracy in the post-factual age", this paper aims to develop a new way of understanding the problem of ‘post-truth populism’ and its impact on the public sphere. In a second step, we propose to counter the politics of post-truth not merely by insisting on the importance of truth or facts. While important, such insisting alone has not shown to be a promising strategy to better the situation, which is why, additionally, we propose three, non-epistemological, complementary strategic ideas: the cultivation of genuine disagreement as a desirable state of debate, the strategy of temporarily “bracketing truth” for the sake of productive conversation, and a re-evaluation of the importance of dialogue for democratic deliberation. While not losing sight of the necessity of defending truth, then, we argue that a successful strategy to better the present situation will have to rely on a twofold strategy of both defending truth and finding ways for deliberation to be productive and functional.