International Theory (2024), 16 (1), 102–121 doi:10.1017/S1752971923000040
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Post-truth politics and neoliberal competition: the social sources of dogmatic cynicism Sebastian Schindler Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany Author for correspondence: Sebastian Schindler, E-mail: sebastian.schindler@gsi.lmu.de (Received 26 January 2021; revised 7 September 2022; accepted 24 February 2023; first published online 12 April 2023)
Abstract From Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia, from climate change denial to corona denial, so-called post-truth politics are experiencing a global rise. How can we understand and explain this phenomenon? In the attempt to answer this question, this article advances two core claims. First, it suggests that post-truth politics is (despite its name) marked not only by the denial of claims to objective truth, but also by the naturalization of one specific truth claim: namely, the cynical belief that self-interests are behind all public discourse. Second, it locates the social sources of this dogmatic cynicism in the global expansion of neoliberal competition. Key words: Competition; critical theory; cynicism; ideology; naturalization; neoliberalism; post-truth politics
Introduction One iconic scene of so-called post-truth politics is the coining of the term ‘alternative facts’ by Kellyanne Conway, an assistant of President Donald Trump, in a CNN interview in early 2017.1 Conway was pressed to explain the claim that Trump’s inauguration had witnessed the presence of the largest crowd ever in history, a claim that stood in apparent contradiction to photos published inter alia in the New York Times. Rather than admitting that the photos were a correct depiction of factual reality, or alternatively, to deny their factual validity, Conway made the curious claim that there were ‘alternative facts’, as if facts supported both the claim and the counter-claim. While Conway’s claim was met with much outrage by observers, it is crucial to note that her statement does not necessarily express belief in an epistemological relativism, that is, a belief that truth is irrelevant because there is, for epistemological reasons, no objective knowledge. Rather, the idea that facts have ‘alternatives’ seems closely tied to a specific interpretation of political contestation according to which journalists are not objective observers, but merely represent this or that side 1
CNN 2017.
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971923000040 Published online by Cambridge University Press