Postmodernism is defined as the reaction to assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. Postmodernism says that there is no real truth. It says that knowledge is always made or invented and not discovered. Postmodernism is based on the principle that concepts, ideas and language itself are subjective and arbitrary “constructs”. As postmodern people search for truth, they base their conclusions on their own research, individual experiences, and personal relationships instead of on the truth accepted by their parents, government or church. Thus all conceptual thought, including science, is also oppressive. There can be no objective truth. Because knowledge is made by people, a person cannot know something for sure – all ideas and facts are ‘believed’ instead of ‘known’. Remember the greatest fault of postmodernism is that it lacks an agenda for social change. Kierkegaard observes, “Everyone one wants progress, no one wants change.”
Decision-makers on Wall Street with extreme individualism and a sense of entitlement chose not to apply critical thinking, but to intentionally take advantage of people, which led to the meltdown of the economy in 2008. Many in the middle class saw their comfortable retirement, their home equity, and their dreams destroyed. With rising financial integration, world economic growth has lessened in recent years. The threat to individual freedom and opportunities to pursue one’s goals today comes not from political oppression, but from economic failure. Because of growing disillusionment and anger students and workers voted for leaders outside the mainstream party candidates during the 2024 presidential election – the consequence of being left behind by soaring inequality and the economic burden on workers. Donald Trump – figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger – was superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base.
People’s judgements about inflation and immigration were harsh during this election season, and these views harmed their assessments of Kamala Harris and strengthened the case for Trump. Donald Trump convinced many Americans that the economy is terrible, but a new analysis shows that’s just as false as his election fraud claims that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection. Many Americans are struggling economically, and inflation was indeed high two years ago, but the unemployment rate is low, inflation has dropped significantly, economic growth is strong and median household income is higher than in Trump’s last year in office, wrote journalist and author Steven Greenhouse for The Guardian. “The truth is that the economy was in far worse shape during Trump’s last year in office, when the unemployment rate soared to 14.8 percent during the pandemic, compared with 4.1 percent in 2024.
Despite having access to more information than ever before, Americans’ trust in the news media has been declining in recent years, and nearly three-quarters of Americans say the news media is making political polarization worse. In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates. The internet platforms that control online distribution can limit the reach of various stories if they want to, but the baseline case is that they don’t want to. A story that appears in any outlet can go viral. This has two critical implications. One is that you can’t actually stop a given piece of information from reaching people just by having “mainstream” outlets ignore it.
The disinformation risks have grown stronger in recent months due to new tech tools such as generative AI. There are easy-to-use tools that can create false pictures, videos, audio, and narratives. People no longer need a technical background to use AI tools but can make requests through prompts and templates and become master propagandists. We need digital literacy programs that train people on how to evaluate online information and spot fakes and deceptions. In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates. Polling data suggest that false claims affected how people saw the candidates, their views about leading issues such as the economy, immigration, and crime, and the way the news media covered the campaign.
According to candidate Trump, there were hordes of migrants overrunning the country’s southern border, unfairly monopolizing scarce public resources and endangering public security through dangerous crime waves. Actual border statistics consistently showed weak support for those claims, but that wasn’t enough to quell unfavorable views about Harris on border security. The idea that 10 million migrants had crossed the border and that many were released after capture was not true, according to independent fact-checkers. Actually, apprehension and release numbers dropped during the Biden administration and were comparable to figures during the Trump administration. Harris had bet on a blue landslide on abortion rights, but forgot that voters care most about guarantees over basic needs. When voters don’t feel economically stable or secure, they will vote against whichever party is in power when given the chance. Democrats need to back off diagnosing, and focus on listening to voters.
Finally, many individuals and organizations have financial incentives to spread blatant lies. Through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms, they make money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be hard to get a serious handle on the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system. Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century. In an era when technological innovations support increasingly inexpensive and easy ways to produce media that looks official, the ability to separate real from artificial has become increasingly complicated and difficult. Conspiracy propagandists are part of the anti-government movement. These groups and individuals intentionally spread disinformation and advance misinformation about government institutions and officials. With the rise of social media and partisan news outlets, everyone now has their own opinions and their own facts.
It is often said that for ‘post-truth’ politicians like Donald Trump, ‘truth itself has become irrelevant’. The post-truth camp rejects the consensus of established expert authorities as untrue, implying that the ‘so-called experts’ are not really experts. Moreover, Trump presents ‘facts’ of his own and even makes them central elements of his rhetoric. The purported facts are often expressed in mathematical formats signaling hard, scientific expertise, that are easy for most to fact check. By setting himself as a crusader against Washington and the media, Trump has played on Americans’ declining trust in both. The practice of post-truth – untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion – helped get Donald Trump, who lied or misled at an unprecedented level, to the White House. The truth camp, in contrast, closely follows the established experts – Democrats tried to convince voters that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country’s future – lost the election.
There is no difference between the fake news, misinformation, disinformation of today – such lies have been churned out for years, but today it is designed to support the plutocracy. There is an orchestrated counter-revolution based on polarization. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies stoke racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies.
When elites turn neoliberalism into crony capitalism instead of well-functioning free markets, they doom democracies and stabilize authoritarian politics. We are in debt to Donald Trump for exposing the ugly network of lies that Rousseau predicted that creates the society in which we live. He pulled back the curtain on the metaphor of the invisible hand exposing the oligarchy that is responsible for the increasing economic inequality between the wealthy and the rest of society. Trump also illustrated how emotion drives decisions – facts are now secondary – how politicians promise change to get elected, then once elected do an about turn and cater to corporate money. Trump ushered in the post-truth era in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. The truth is important because it brings clarity which invites better choices resulting in better outcomes or experiences.
According to Foucault ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are created by those in power. What we take to be true is the dominant worldview that we have been provided with: it is received wisdom, not truth. Foucault rejected the idea that society was progressing. The world is not getting better or getting closer to truth, it is just moving through different worldviews. Foucault adds that the essential political problem for us, today, is trying to change our “political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (where truth is modeled on the form of scientific discourse), in order to constitute a new ‘politics of truth’: “The real political task in a society is to criticize the workings of institutions that ‘appear’ to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”1
1 https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1260.Michel_Foucault