Introduction

When should scholars beware of dictionary definitions of the terms they use to do more robust conceptual work? Post-truth, truth, facts, communication, and, perhaps most unassumingly of all, information, are frequently used without definition or simply by citing, say, Oxford online dictionaries’ ‘word of the year.’ Populism fares better within populism studies itself, but one can find many casual uses of the term outside it. Casual use of these terms has repercussions for what we think we know about post-truth politics and populism, both of which are academically mediated by an information-reductive or ‘infocentric’ conceptualization of perceived public epistemic problems.

Nawrocki (2023) has recently heralded an ‘epistemic turn’ in populism studies, and given this terminology, one might assume there is an automatic and proximate relationship with post-truth politics. Perhaps there is, but on more rigorous examination, the relationship is conditional: primarily regarding epistemic populism studies’ implied conceptualization of communication and information.

My argument will proceed in two main parts, one for post-truth politics and the other for populism, especially ‘epistemic populism.’ In the first part I draw on my theory of post-truth politics and culture, which I have elaborated in several key steps over roughly the last twenty years (2006; 2014; 2015; 2018; 2021; and 2024). I discuss and critique common public and academic uses of the term ‘post-truth,’ before arguing that it is best understood as an anxious public mood about a fragile public epistemology—about the difficulty of securing publicly accepted facts. But ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ are taken-for-granted in most of the literature, which is problematic. The public realm and its ‘epistemology,’ as Arendt observed, lacks sufficiently rigorous collective knowledge and methods to scientifically prove much of anything, relying necessarily, instead, on trust, which is in short supply, for several empirically grounded reasons.

Next, I ask, if one agrees that post-truth is not in the first instance an epistemological problem but one of affect, perception, and trust, then what kind of concept of populism would allow a relation with post-truth to be established? In both phenomena, there is no ‘generalized trust’ in traditional news media, social media, government, political parties, and so forth; codes of mediated trustworthy authority must be performed—again and again (Giddens, 1994). Both post-truth and populism studies tend to overlook the influence of more popular cultural infrastructures of post-truth, which, it can be argued, structure a habitus transposable to political participation (Harsin, 2021). However, both post-truth and epistemic populism studies reduce communication and, more importantly, political rhetoric to information, which eclipses the rhetorical function of shaping and presentation. The performative turn in populism studies would seem to hold great promise in nuancing analyses of epistemic populism. However, even there, performative approaches will need to pay as much attention to how culture and rhetorical form influence orientations to facts across a broader field of populist political rhetoric, instead of focusing on the key identity-making of elites/people. The importance of culture should inspire post-truth and populism studies to consider both more macro-social and historical influences on populism as political practice and more micro-rhetorical instances of how populist rhetoric presents and shapes statements of facts and falsehoods.

Post-truth Politics, Mediation, and Trust

We have heard that truth is dead and buried (Kakutani, 2019), that ‘post-truth’ arrived with Brexit (D’Ancona, 2017). We have also heard from other commentators that there is nothing new here, and that politics has always been full of lies, rumors, and general deception (Finlayson, 2019). The latter claim—it refers to politics from time immemorial—like so many other quick and fast takes, is based on the problematic Oxford dictionary’s definition of post-truth when it awarded it the 2016 ‘word of the year’ as ‘relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (N.D.)Footnote 1 What are the conditional ‘circumstances’ that make ‘objective facts…less influential…’? Objective facts, as opposed to subjective facts? What then are ‘facts’? Does scholarship on public opinion formation support the presumption that in the past, public opinion was demonstrably the product of familiarity with facts? After neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio’s popular Descartes’ Error  (1994), and the work of other scholars in his wake, it is problematic to speak of a reason/emotion split in types of cognition. Though there are apparently degrees of emotional intensity at any moment, all types of reasoning are accompanied by emotion; it cannot be ‘shut off.’ Long before, Aristotle was likely the first to have taught us that persuasion works through ethos (character or credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic, reasoning). Besides which, how is it possible to measure more or less emotion (or influence of personal belief) in public discourse over past centuries (or even decades) as a function of public opinion formation? The definition does not seem a strong candidate for becoming an academic concept, yet it is almost parasympathetically cited any time a scholar mentions post-truth.

In one of the least rigorous arguments about what post-truth and its causes might be, McIntyre (2018) has speculated that ‘postmodern’ relativism is an important agent. Assuming one charitably agrees with what he characterizes as ‘postmodern,’ it is not obvious how an academic theory somehow crossed over to shape popular culture and the public realm (see also, Ólafsson, this volume). There are more compelling, evidence-based genealogies of post-truth, which demonstrate that it springs partly from the well of liberal democracy itself, or at least from its political and popular culture together (Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023; Harsin, 2006, 2015, 2018a, b, 2024; Mejia et al., 2018).

The ‘post-’ in post-truth needs careful attention, since a quick glance may infer that truth has left the building. It is of course a performative contradiction to assert that truth is dead or in eclipse, and all evidence shows that instead of people being disinterested in truth and facts, they are obsessed with them, as are we. While a public and academic discourse circulates broadly, announcing a new age where emotional statements are confused with or take precedence over statements of fact, evidence points to a more complicated public realm where the social and institutional mechanisms (authority and trust) by which public facts that used to be established and mostly accepted have shifted. Thus, the first important question might be that if ‘truth’ has suffered in public life (whose?), why, and most importantly, what kind of ‘truth’ is that? Philosophers, if not theologians and lie-detecting machines, point to its ontological variety. As I have argued for nearly 20 years, cultural shifts, new communication and media technologies, historically new phases of promotional, attentional, and surveillance capitalism, marked by ‘influencer culture,’ media production technologies capable of deepfakes, even accompanied by new digital cognitive habituses, the increasing sophistication and intensity of professional political strategy and consulting that takes ruthless aim at the citizenry as objects to be managed, the breakdown of professional journalism as a gatekeeper for news and public agendas and public truth-telling, the hyper-mediatization of political communication and the deep mediatization of everyday digitally embedded reality, and the massive weight of an ever-increasing public distrust of traditional the social and political institutions of liberal democracy itself—these are agents of post-truth politics (Harsin, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018a; Kalpokas, 2018, ch. 3). Post-truth, I maintain, is far more complex than a trendy term for those who, with political historical amnesia, don’t realize that politics has always been rife with lies, inaccuracies, and systematic deception. But what, then, is the ‘truth’ in post-truth?

In English, truth has a conceptual advantage over ‘fact,’ when applied to the common political phenomena under analysis here, by having connotations of both factuality and honesty. If someone is telling the truth, they are not lying (even though what they’re telling may be inaccurate; it’s a matter of truth as sincerity, honesty). This version of truth in post-truth points to a moral problem—deception. The second use and meaning of truth in the dictionary sense is what is true, what corresponds to fact or reality, or a fact or belief that is (publicly) accepted as true (Oxford dictionaries, N.D.). As Sissella Bok noted in her landmark work on lying, truth is one of the most mesmerizing, debated, and essential terms and concepts in human history and certainly in philosophy. ‘No concept,’ she writes, ‘intimidates and yet draws thinkers so powerfully.’

Philosophy’s leading theories of truth include correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories. Is a belief or proposition true just so long as it coheres with or doesn’t contradict other beliefs and propositions in a shared sphere or system? Is a belief or statement true so long as it corresponds to facts, and if so, how do we know them? Is a belief through scientific inquiry true so long as new evidence doesn’t contradict it, and when it does, what was true then becomes false—truth being the ideal end that inquiry seeks? Do any of these theoretical vignettes sound like the truth or facts that generate so much public and academic concern around ‘post-truth’? As already mentioned, post-truth seems to cover more conceptual ground that ‘post-fact,’ but facts are also conceptually nettlesome. Consider the ‘facts’ entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Facts, philosophers like to say, are opposed to theories and to values …and are to be distinguished from things, in particular from complex objects, complexes and wholes, and from relations. They are the objects of certain mental states and acts, they make truth-bearers true and correspond to truths, they are part of the furniture of the world. Not only do philosophers oppose facts to theories and to values, they sometimes distinguish between facts which are brute and those which are not. (Mulligan & Correia, 2007)

But in the hurly-burly public realm of clashing opinions and appeals, facts, it would seem, are constantly muddied by language (often deliberately), are modified by values, even if just by cohabiting paragraphs or images, and are narratively placed in relation to other facts and wholes. In fact, it’s not always clear what the statement of fact means, especially without context.

Public Truth/Facts vs Scientific and Mathematical, or Rational Truth

In developing a theory of post-truth, I join other scholars (Hyvönen, 2018; Newman, 2019) in adopting Hannah Arendt’s influential distinctions between scientific, mathematical, philosophical (dubbed ‘rational’), and factual truth (Harsin, 2024).

Arendt’s conceptual distinctions may help us avoid the endless debates between these theories of truth or the naïve use of truth in diagnosing different problems regarding deception, error, honesty, and fact. In Truth and Politics (1969), Arendt distinguishes between ‘rational truth’ (philosophical, scientific, mathematical) and the more ‘fragile’ ‘factual truth,’ which becomes ‘true’ in the collective context of the public realm. ‘The modern age, which believes that truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by the human mind,’ she writes, ‘has assigned… mathematical, scientific, and philosophical truths to the common species of rational truth as distinguished from factual truth’ (p. 231). Truth in post-truth would appear to be factual truth honestly articulated.

Arendt argues that rational truth has a ‘coercive’ force, in that I am rationally ‘coerced’ to acknowledge the mathematical truth that 2 + 2 = 4; or 2 − 2 = 0. Try asserting that 2 − 2 = 1 when I steal your two cookies, leaving you with none. Your unsated sweet tooth and your failure to conjure the one cookie will likely coerce you to accept the mathematical truth. While scientific truth, for its part, is compelling to those who have enough knowledge and training to follow its reasoning, its truth status can shift in a way that mathematical truth cannot, as history of science shows. Science, C.S. Peirce famously noted, ‘is not standing on the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present’ (1998, p. 55). For scientific truth, the present can last for centuries. However, factual truth is different. It is ‘fragile,’ Arendt says.

Public facts may have a ‘stubborn validity’ and inform opinions and judgments; however, they are ‘no more self-evident than opinion’ (Arendt, 1969, p. 343). More ‘fragile’ than rational or scientific truth, they could always have been otherwise, and given the right context of power, as the historian will note, they can become otherwise; the factual record can be erased or revised. As an example of factual truth, then, Arendt proposes, ‘In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium.’ The statement might seem to have the same ‘coercive’ force as 2 + 2 = 4. But that would be a false inference. Factual truth lacks the coercive epistemic force of mathematical truth. Why is it fragile? Because it can be distorted, banished, or erased. ‘A factual statement—Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914—acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context,’ she explains, which critically anticipates the widespread but deeply problematic contemporary scholarship and popular discourse that treats post-truth as an information problem, since it systematically abstracts statements of fact (false ones) from their linguistic, rhetorical, cultural, and historical contexts of interpretation. Arendt’s other major example, also historical, is a factual erasure, at least in the Soviet context: ‘the role during the Russian Revolution of a man named Trotsky’ (1969, p. 231). ‘Factual truth’ is no more self-evident than opinion, which is probably why opinion-holders find it relatively easy, depending on the company and situation, to discredit factual truth as ‘just another opinion,’ or ‘just fake news.’

Factual truth’s fragility also stems from its common types of evidence, such as testimony ‘by eyewitnesses,’ which Arendt reminds us, is ‘notoriously unreliable.’ Factual truth’s fragility is demonstrable in other problematic forms of evidence, which we nonetheless have no choice to rely on as we make our way through the world’s uncertainty, not the least of which is political uncertainty: ‘records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries,’ again pointing to the fragility of public facts and to the public epistemological tyranny that power may inflict. What is more: ‘In the event of a dispute, only other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked, and settlement is usually arrived at by way of a majority; that is, in the same way as the settlement of opinion disputes—a wholly unsatisfactory procedure, since there is nothing to prevent witnesses from being false witnesses’ (p. 243).

Arendt’s truth distinctions and concept of public truth as ‘factual truth’ helps us see what is at stake at the heart of the documentation of, and panic about, clashing truth claims without commonly respected adjudicators. Importantly, the clashes take place within an immediate context and history of what Arendt calls ‘organized lying.’ ‘Organizing’ points to planning and systematicity, which she associates with totalitarianism, but also with ‘Madison Avenue’ (1972, p. 8), uncannily prescient of arguments that orientations toward political truth-telling and truth in truth-tellers derive from the transposable habitus of promotional and attentional capitalism, and the mediatization of politics, whereby political communication increasingly has adapted to ‘media logics’ or values and citizens’ orientations toward consuming entertainment (Corner & Pels, 2003; Harsin, 2006, 2014, 2021). It is this political strategy of undermining the very idea of publicly accepted factual truths that Linda Zerilli has recently emphasized as a central feature of post-truth politics. Developing Arendt’s insights in the context of post-truth questions, Zerilli (2020) compellingly argues that what makes factual truth an especially political problem (just more obvious in the context of post-truth’s ‘alternative facts’) is that it appears to be an increasing struggle to make it ‘publicly accepted.’ Acceptance is a key condition for political judgments and action, for then, if not as coercive as mathematical truth, perhaps even transitorily, publicly accepted facts become actionable as part of politics (to produce public opinion or policy, to influence voting, etc.) and may also alter social relations, depending on which people or institutions publicly acknowledge them. As Zerilli says, it’s the difference between ‘knowing (truth) and acknowledging (truth)’ (2012, p. 71; see also Harsin, 2024; Newman, 2019; Galanopoulos & Stavrakakis, 2022).

Trust, Mediation, and Publicly Accepted Facts

Arendt, writing in the shadow of the Cold War and the threat of totalitarian fact erasure, focuses on historical examples. However, the factual truths of post-truth are especially about the mediation of, among other things, scientific truth/knowledge in public life. It is there where intermediary truth interpreters’ stories, frames, and rhetorical devices struggle to establish (or undermine) ‘publicly accepted fact[s]’ (Zerilli, 2012). The public realm is a space where scientific truths and opinions are interpreted by cultural intermediaries (including journalists, politicians, and citizens) and re-mixed into various forms of persuasive appeal. Two of the most obtrusively global examples of this unpredictable rhetorical phenomenon are climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, wherein one has observed not so much a flat rejection of expert truth claims but doubts about the mediation and presentation of those claims, as well as the credibility of intermediaries who present them. While the volatility of public opinion about these crises is disquieting, upon closer consideration, it reveals the peculiar (public) truth-making function of public trust in highly mediated democracies. This is a crucial point about post-truth (and perhaps for populism, to be considered shortly): commentary too often confuses public facts for scientific truth and their validity standards, when in fact, public facts depend on the weak or ‘liminal’ epistemology of trust.Footnote 2 As I’ve explained elsewhere, ‘in modernity public factual truth is especially professionally produced and machine-distributed, word-of-mouth not serving the needs of scale that characterize modern nation states as imagined communities’ (Harsin, 2024, p. 9). In our epistemological relationship to these mediated facts, as with anything we don’t know directly, we revert to authority and trust, in ways not unlike knowledge available via testimony (Hardwig, 1991, p. 698). As Longino explains, our ‘common knowledge is acquired from others.’ Indeed, ‘[w]e depend on experts to tell us what is wrong or right with our appliances, our cars, our bodies.’ In fact, ‘much of what we later come to know depends on what we previously learned as children from our parents and teachers,’ and via ‘institutions of education, journalism, and scientific inquiry.’ Consequently, ‘we do not know most of what we think we know’ (Harsin, 2024, p. 9; Longino, 2016, para 9).

Thus, ‘if there is a close modern relationship between trust and public facts (also as scientific truths translated into public idioms and shaped for presentation), then post-truth would appear to be partly a problem with distrust in those cultural translators and also at least partly a question of changing codes of competitively performing trustworthiness,’ and the popular validity of public facts would depend heavily on mediated trust (Harsin, 2024, p. 9). These close relationships between trust as a truth-bearer have been emphasized by recent empirical studies. For example, in her recent study of non-vaccinating parents, Diana Popescu-Sarry concludes that such parents’ choices reflect ‘misplaced distrust in testimony, not indifference to facts’ (2023).

Academic and popular critics of post-truth and populism have a habit of emphasizing an ostensibly alarming public stupidity about scientific truth in ways that seem to misunderstand how social epistemology and trust function in modernity, early and late. One hears a refrain in the post-truth literature (and in epistemic populist literature) that people no longer trust experts or science (Nichols, 2017). But how many of us are scientists who can produce, discover, or verify scientific truth? Very few of us ever really understand scientific truth, and while scientific literacy is a noble project, it will not solve the problem of the public realm being fundamentally about doxa (justified beliefs), not episteme (justified true beliefs). We can trust, or not, mediated testimonies of experts, based perhaps on something we ‘know’ about the issue at hand, from pollution and electric cars to climate change; but we can’t engage in scientific verification. Scientific truth is never something discoverable and collectively knowable in the public realm anyway; it does not have means to produce or verify it (Arendt, 1969; Zerilli, 2012). While Arendt, perhaps more than anyone, stressed this point about democratic public life, Plato, from a more anxiously elitist perch, had already made the proposition an object of critical reflection. Of the role of the expert orator, but not epistemologically expert in the subjects with which he may persuade, the sophist Gorgias explains:

You might well be amazed, Socrates, if you knew the whole truth and realized that oratory embraces and controls almost all other spheres of human activity. I can give you a striking proof of this. It has often happened that I have gone with my brother and other doctors to visit some sick person who refused to drink his medicine or to submit to surgery or cautery, and when the doctors could not persuade him I have succeeded, simply by my use of the art of oratory. I tell you that, if in any city you care to name, an orator and a doctor had to compete before the Assembly or in any other gathering for the appointment of a medical officer, the man who could speak would be appointed if he wanted the post, and the doctor would end up nowhere. Similarly, if he had to compete with any other professional worker the orator could get himself appointed against any opposition; there is no subject on which he could not speak before a popular audience more persuasively than any professional of whatever kind. (Plato, Gorgias, 456,b-c)

About 2500 years later, these public epistemological (i.e. rhetorical) relations—scientific truth, expertise, mediation, trust, and establishment of public fact—are succinctly captured in a recent French public opinion study, with the title ‘Poll: the French have an excellent impression of science, but they have weak knowledge about it’ (my translation, Fourquet, 2022). The public dilemma of trusting/distrusting intermediary truth interpreters and raconteurs about some factual truths isn’t resignation to technocracy. The reliance on mediated trust does not prevent us from accepting public facts and then potentially using them in public argumentation to produce public opinion.

Both discourse about post-truth and criticism of populism share a feverish concern about public distrust of professional news media, traditionally viewed by liberals as the ‘watchdog,’ or ‘Fourth Estate.’ But that concern would lead to more rigorous theory and analysis if it had a stronger grasp of the role public trust plays in the security of mediatized publicly accepted facts. One can look to one liberal democracy’s pioneering theorists of news, mediation, trust, and public opinion for insight on this problem (which is also a problem of contemporary concerns regarding ‘post-truth’ and populism). For these relations are still today much what they were when Walter Lippmann described them in 1922 as a pillar of his so-called ‘democratic realism’: ‘The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined’ (p. 29). That world is necessarily still out of sight and a matter of imagining through mediated evidence, especially under conditions of what Couldry and Hepp call ‘deep mediatization’: ‘the advanced stage of the process in which all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures’ (2018, p. 7).

The process of establishing public trust thus has a fundamentally performative aspect. As Giddens (1994), Möllering (2001), and others have noted, trust is contingently (re-) produced or compromised at the public interface of all modern institutions and their bureaucracies, from banking to healthcare, education, and news media. In her Cold War context, Arendt couldn’t image or didn’t find disquieting the possibility that falsehoods may be accepted as public fact through the performance of credibility. Nor could she foresee how, even in the eerie wake of Goebbel’s systematic orchestration of the ‘big lie,’ in conditions of contemporary social media and digital culture the way falsehoods might be repeated to the point of being publicly accepted facts—though the question of threshold of collective acceptance for the label ‘publicly accepted fact’ is debatable. With these caveats in mind, we can say that ‘truth’ in post-truth is best characterized in Arendt’s and Zerilli’s sense (2012, 2020) of publicly accepted facts, public truth (Harsin, 2024; Newman, 2019); and that it is inevitably a function at least partly of public trust, which is mediated and performative.

Furthermore, drawing from the widespread survey evidence that people are worried about fake news, polarization, distrust, and the future of liberal democracy, I’ve argued that post-truth—not just ‘truth’ in post-truth—is best viewed as a concept referring only indirectly to epistemic qualities of political discourse, and that it is a public mood about that hyperbolic discourse (Harsin, 2024). It is hyperbolic first because, as I and others have said, there is no compelling sign that people are ready to retire the word truth from the dictionary and the concept from operation in everyday life. Second, there is no way of comparatively measuring deception (falsehoods) or inaccuracies in the public realm in ancient Athens and today. What is clear is that in public discourse,Footnote 3 including surveys about public perceptions of the issue, people perceive a problem regarding public facts and have strong anxious feelings about it. For example, a 2022 survey-based study by Knuutila, Neudert & Howard sampling more than 150,000 people in 142 countries, revealed that more than half ‘worry about misinformation’; ‘young and low-income groups most concerned.’ They continue: ‘Risk perception among internet users varies starkly across regions whereby concern is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (74.2%), and lowest in South Asia (31.2%). Differences are unrelated to the prevalence of misinformation, yet concern is highest in countries with liberal democratic governments.’

Post-truth refers to something else beyond the mere documentation of widely circulating falsehoods, and it certainly cannot mean that people no longer care about facts in public discourse or that a new relativism has cast a shadow over liberal democracies (and populisms) the world over. Rather: post-truth is an anxious public mood about an approaching dystopia where publicly accepted facts have no hope of being established—because trust is constantly, even systematically, undermined (Harsin, 2006, 2024).

Populism and Post-truth Politics

If post-truth, then, is not a popular epistemology but a collective affect about the challenges of public epistemology, what about populism? Like ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news,’ it is frequently cited as a ‘threat to democracy.’ But is there something peculiarly epistemic about populism in the current conjuncture or as a general phenomenon? Do the materialized peoples of populist movements and parties have something like a ‘natural’ or structurally predictable relationship not just to exaggeration and unprovable claims about entire groups of people and histories but to factual claims and authorities? Do they contribute to (a potential causal role) post-truth’s anxious mood that publicly shrouds liberal democracy’s processes, or do they result from it? Both? Neither?

I have argued that post-truth has many convergent causes, but that public distrust in an array of institutions implicated in liberal democracy is the most basic grounds for its emergence and re-production. Publicly accepted facts come from trust in the primary producers of factual knowledge. Distrust is also fundamental to the emergence of populisms. As Margaret Canovan writes, ‘Populist appeals to the people are characteristically couched in a style that is `democratic’ in the sense of being aimed at ordinary people. Capitalizing on popular distrust of politicians’ evasiveness and bureaucratic jargon, they pride themselves on simplicity and directness’ (1999, p. 5). Others note how populism is partly a response to dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties and journalism (Broersma, 2012).

Thus, we might acknowledge the historical specificity of post-truth politics and particular populisms. Post-truth refers (upon any extended reflection) to a historically specific set of trust-making relations, styles of political discourse, which are facilitated by convergent developments: digital media, the attention economy, and contemporary promotional culture in which mediated political communication and news is embedded; the hyper-development of instrumentalist persuasive industries driven by political consultants; mediatized politics; and infotainment trends in journalism as well as its loss of monopoly on news gatekeeping, attention, and agenda-setting—now shared with social media—which seemed to create conditions ripe for the frequent generation and wide circulation of rumors, conspiracy theories, and ‘fake news’ (identified as such as early as 2004; Harsin, 2006, 2023)—to name just a few forces driving the epistemic malaise. Who could adjudicate the constant swarm of controversial truth claims? A major cultural effect of these conjunctural forces is collective anxiety but also distrust or loss of confidence, including for liberal democracy’s institutions and processes: elections, representation, the function of journalism, public opinion formation, ‘citizen efficacy’ (Calhoun et al., 2022).

In another sense, exploring potential connections between post-truth politics and populism seems like a rendezvous with redundancy. While populism may have some basic distinguishing characteristics, it counts as politics, and in many liberal democracies as well as autocratic regimes (Liu, 2023), that politics is post-truth. Neither concept would seem to be epiphenomenal of the other; post-truth doesn’t cause populism, nor vice-versa. But while post-truth politics can in no rigorous way be seen to cause populism, populism, like all other public-facing contemporary politics, is mediatized by post-truth politics. Indeed, by this logic, and given the surveys on global distrust cited previously in this chapter, either most citizens in most liberal democracies are now populist-curious (at least in attitudes toward institutional authorities) or populism shares more with the larger liberal democratic culture at this particular time than is often assumed. Its attitudes and styles of communication appear as more intensified versions of the liberal democratic culture out of which it issues, and the contradictions to which it responds and around which it organizes. Public epistemic concerns (about fake news and political deception) and academic concerns about public epistemology cannot easily be limited to populists; nor can distrust of politicians and news media. The larger population shares these qualities with populists (Harsin, 2024).

Amidst other changes has come distrust in the authority of cultural intermediary truth-tellers, ‘opinion leaders,’ and even the means by which truths are told (e.g. social media platforms and technologies). There have also been changes in the way mediated social relationships are imagined and conducted. There are new cultural forms, temporalities, spaces, and cognitions associated with digitally embedded communication (Couldry & Hepp, 2018; Harsin, 2015, 2021). A basic question for scholars interested in the intersection of post-truth politics and populism is this: does one admit the influence of mediated popular cultureFootnote 4 on the political realm, and if so, how is post-truth (or ‘information disorders’) so influenced?

In the current conjuncture,Footnote 5 populism and post-truth politics are equally constrained and afforded by ‘the attention economy,’ ‘promotional culture,’ ‘infotainment,’ and digitally mediated ‘parasocial relations’ (Harsin, 2018b, 2021, 2024). These are complex relations that are too often skirted over in a sentence at best, in both post-truth politics and populism studies. I call them post-truth’s cultural infrastructures. A few words about them are necessary enroute to a discussion of the ‘epistemic’ aspects of populism, since we are tempted to locate causation of populism and post-truth in bad ‘counter-knowledge,’ without asking what cultural influences provide dispositions toward truth-telling and which might point to much more challenging solutions to the perceived epistemic problems.

Post-truth’s (and Most Populisms’) Cultural Infrastructures

One can still say, as Corner and Pels wrote in 2003, that culture ‘continues usefully to signal a range of things still too often left out of account in many conventional research perspectives’ (p. 3). It ‘indicate[s] the realms of political experience, imagination, values and dispositions that provide the settings within which a political system operates, shaping the character of political processes and political behaviour.’ Moreover, these ‘elements’ form a ‘political culture that, among other things, interconnect[s] the ‘official’ world of professional politics with the world of everyday experience and with the modes of ‘the popular’ variously to be found within work and leisure’ (p. 3). In fact, critical communication and media scholars have long demonstrated how ‘the popular’ traverses, influences, and to some degree absorbs or ‘mediatizes’ traditional politics and journalism as professional and social practices (Hall, 1978/2018; Hartley, 2009; Jones, 2005; Street et al., 2013; Harsin, 2021). While the ‘popular’ aspects of culture get short shrift in most post-truth and populism studies,Footnote 6 if we are to explore potential relations between post-truth politics and populism, shifts in popular culture, its media structures, and communication practices, cannot be ignored.

Over the last twenty years, media and politics scholars have increasingly investigated the complex relations of twenty-first-century political culture, especially dynamics of celebrity and politics, ‘infotainment’ and ‘politainment,’ the attention economy, and ‘mediatization,’ the latter becoming a dominant concept (Corner, 2018; Corner & Pels, 2003; Harsin, 2015, 2019; Mazzoleni, 2014; Riegert & Collins, 2016). At the same time, some scholars were announcing an epochal interpenetrating epistemic and fiduciary (trust-related) shift in liberal democracy’s political communication forms and processes (Corner & Pels, 2003; Harsin, 2006). It was closely related to a crisis of public trust, influenced by several conjunctural causes such as the rise of ‘prosumer’ or self-mass communication, as Manuel Castells called the latter; the breakdown of mass media (journalism) gatekeeping and its entanglement with infotainment business models and celebrity politics; prominent media-politics scandals involving plagiarism and hoaxes; and the increasingly sophisticated and ruthless work of professional political communication strategists and practitioners to influence the epistemic, fiduciary or trust-based, and affective aspects of the public realm. Public discourse was increasingly self-reflexive about its own epistemic status, which even by 2004, some scholars were identifying as shaped profoundly by new forms of strategic expression in the old/new media convergence culture, such as common audiovisual hoaxes, ‘rumor bombs,’ and ‘fake news’ (Harsin, 2006).

A couple of developments may deserve extra emphasis, as less obvious influences on political culture and public epistemology: promotional culture/attention economy and the shift to a deeply digital mediatization of politics, the fourth age of political communication (Sorensen, 2024).

Promotional culture studies argue that culture and social relations have been powerfully transformed by the role of communication in new forms of consumer capitalism—the latter’s hyper-promotional stage, with no small effects on perceptions of honesty, truth claims, and trust-granting (Edwards, 2021). Hearn explains that ‘[p]romotionalism names the extension of market values and commodity relations in all areas of life’ where we ‘see our selves, relationships, political candidates, and social issues’ in promotional terms. Moreover, we ‘can no longer determine, or read, genuinely expressive intent or determine what is truth as opposed to a lie, what is authentic as opposed to ‘spun’ in this kind of culture. Indeed, she asks, ‘how can we recognize or construct legitimate authority? What is the impact of the generalized public acceptance of ‘spin’ and promotional politics on the democratic process’ when promotion ‘comes to dominate and structurally condition all other forms of political expression and power relations?’ (2011).

The most recent development in promotionalism is its emphasis on digital cultural opinion leaders, or ‘influencers,’ and this would seem to have repercussions for epistemic aspects of the public realm. A recent Guardian article emphasized the phenomenon’s transpositional character, orienting perception and behavior across consumer culture and politics, whose lines have been progressively blurred. ‘Over the past century, political parties and brands have spent vast sums of money on trying to get our attention and influence our decisions,’ and today our attention is the target of these new ‘hustlers,’ some with millions of followers. Importantly, ‘[f]or many influencers, deception is lucrative, and becoming increasingly extreme’ (Brown, 2022).

Consumer capitalism has of course always been about what its promoters view as innocuous games of seduction and deception, as if those practices are sealed off in a corner of social life and don’t orient our habitus more generally. But this latest development is different, with everyone potentially being an entrepreneur and their own advertiser-brander, and PR agent, thanks to the ‘democratized’ access to media and communication production technologies. Once we acknowledge this huge cultural shift, why wouldn’t we assume some impact of a loosely epistemic sort on political culture, too? Thus, the paradox: people are anxious about the difficulty of arriving at publicly accepted facts (evidenced by the surveys about perception of ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation,’ ‘threats to democracy’), but they—we—also participate eagerly in a culture where media and communication are hyper-instrumentalized for supposedly innocuous deception. This cynicism has an impact on political style and performance.

In the main, both post-truth and populism studies neglect the cultural infrastructures and their structure and agency regarding truth-telling, (dis-)trust, and publicly accepted (or rejected) facts. It is easier to simply document false statements and correlate cognitive bias, but that focus is consequentially myopic. Keeping the broad converging cultural factors in mind helps scholars better understand what may influence populist rhetoric and ideologies and speak to deeper historically ongoing unresolved social and political problems (Moran & Littler, 2020).

Why is it important to acknowledge these larger cultural and historical forces when talking about populism, especially its epistemic aspects? Because, for starters, in looking for causes and effects, it guards against overfocusing on the agents of populist epistemology and their personal beliefs at the expense of the influence of larger structures, which will point to a different set of extremely challenging problems and solutions.

The Ideational Concept’s Epistemic Traps

After reflection, some might object that populism is epistemic in specific ways, not just generally affected by the fragility of public facts peculiar to post-truth politics. They might insist that populism’s supposedly specific constitutive feature, the construction of the elite/people, us/them binary depends on false narratives and ‘counter-knowledges,’ thereby warranting specific attention in accounts of post-truth politics. One can find examples of false claims or counter-knowledge as actual foundations of populist movements such as the ‘birthers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers,’ or, as I have explored, the French anti-gender theory movement (Harsin, 2018b). The primum mobile of each of these movements is a false premise that a nefarious ‘they’ make, which rhetorically creates ‘us,’ courageous truth-tellers.

However, one can share a concern about these right-wing linked movements as well as more identarian movements and parties scapegoating immigrants and influencing anti-immigration and nativist cultural policies (e.g. banning the Muslim veil in France) across numerous liberal democracies, yet also resist assuming that these dispositions are made on the spot, and, worse, are simply discursive entities. One can look to the ideational and strategic models for the sources of these temptations, for they ignore the influence of the cultural conjuncture, a historical accumulation of liberal democratic failures, and disavow the porousness of the elite/people divide, or its materiality (Calhoun et al., 2022).Footnote 7

The ideational theory is based on the idea of either a fundamental (ontological) or historically specific (or situational) antagonism between two political forces with opposing moral valences: corrupt elites and virtuous people (Mudde, 2017). Recent adopters of the approach, in the wake of right-wing populist uprisings, often mobilize the idea of the antagonistic binary people/elite to show that ‘the people’ in question are not what they claim to be but rather a materialized synecdoche, which they nonetheless weaponize in exclusionary (perhaps hateful and violent) ways. Meanwhile, the elite are a demagogic illusion. Then scholars move quickly on to show how the movement presses toward its goals of influencing policy or seizing power, by successfully employing seductive falsehoods and ongoing deception, and through a highly emotional, usually angry or fearmongering rhetoric. While there is no shortage of that kind of populism (or general behavior), this ideational focus that entails a kind of ideology critique (false consciousness; no ‘the people,’ no ‘elites’), tends to mobilize research that risks obscuring the public epistemological complexity of the phenomenon it wishes to document, explain (and condemn).

The concept’s own thinness obscures a fuller picture of both populism and its complicated causes. While space prevents me from a lengthy examination of these potential errors, I will briefly outline two major problems before pivoting to the epistemic turn.

Risk 1 Elite/People Fiction

The ideational approach allows one to look at typological variations and emphases of the core antagonism—elites/people—and thus, the core is present in all accounts. While an abstraction, the concept elites/people is taken by some, if not most, scholars of right-wing populism to be the populists’ epistemological flaw. Complexity is lost in the popular mobilization of this trope, scholars lament, and it can lead to scapegoating and polarization. However, the emphasis on the inevitable oversimplification of reality in elite/people can lead to academic accounts that cannot admit that a real grievance may exist; that its indignation is authorized by a country’s political values and history; and that a real elite may deserve critical attention for allegedly threatening the country’s democratic institutions and processes (which may need deep restructuring if their practices are out of sync with the principles they serve). These latter potential realities, and the politics that stem from them, may be obscured in ideational accounts that focus on a problematic ‘Manichean’ ontology and ‘folk’ epistemology present in populism.Footnote 8

Of course, immediate dismissal of the elites-focused complaint entails risks. For ‘elites’ has been a term of social scientific conceptual development and analysis for at least seventy years and is a flexible but never ‘empty’ signifier (Higley & Burton, 2006; Mills, 1956; Rahman Khan, 2012; Scott & Marshall, 2009; Wacquant, 1993). Elites are that social demographic that has ‘control over ‘power resources’ concentrated in large organizations, for example capital, authority, means of coercion, mass communication, knowledge, and charisma, as well as capacity…[in] groups to act in concert’ (Scott & Marshall, 2009, p. 162). In fact, one could argue that elites enjoy the status of a social scientific object that eludes their antagonist, the people.

As Kaltwasser has written regarding strategies for responding to populisms, one should keep in mind that populism’s ‘emergence can be explained to a great extent by the sense in the electorate that the ideas and interests of ‘the people’ are not being taken into consideration’ (2017). Academically reductionist portrayals of the pair, which are not merely rhetorical, can mirror the rhetoric they find dangerously fictive; they may end up not just unhelpful but, worse, retrograde in resorting to medical tropes of disease in the democracy’s body.

Many populist criticisms of elites (even if too often generalized) have equally many empirical referents. As the populists at Oxfam put it in January 2023, ‘Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years’ (January 16, 2023); or Bloomberg: ‘Top 1% of U.S. Earners Now Hold More Wealth Than All of the Middle Class’ (Tanzi & Dorning, 2021). To this one could add justified perceptions of non-dialogue and non-representativity with regard to astonishing ratios of representative to constituent in countries such as India (Vaishnav & Hintson, 2018) and the U.S. (DeSilver, 2018). These complaints correspond to the mountain of surveys indicating not just marginal populist but majority distrust of elites and/or lack of confidence in their leadership (Grönlund et al., 2017; Hannon, 2020; Mackenzie & Sorial, 2022; Scudder, 2016).

Risk 2 Rigid People/Elite Binary Is Conceptually Misleading

Second, not only does the ideational construct risk dematerializing historically specific referents, (whether ideologically one doesn’t like them is beside the point), taking the elite/people distinction as rhetorical and intangible may also obscure the fact that the academic rhetorical construction—for populists rarely self-identify with the slur—is itself misleadingly exclusive, a criticism Katsambekis has made with regard to the ‘homogeneity thesis,’ that populists imagine the people as homogenous (2022). In the abstract, these are two categories that are ontologically distinct—that one can’t be part of the people and the elite; one can’t be elite and be a promoter or deliberate facilitator of the populist movement. But, empirically speaking, some movements labeled populists by academics and by their opponents are elite-facilitated—resourced financially, strategically (or both), or at other levels of participation.

The people that constitute movements and parties may often feel they are a public, self-organized around an issue, and taking their grievances to a broad audience, may often be unaware of elite roles in it. This is especially the case for initially hidden elite roles in strategy, organization, and the funding of populist movements and parties (the conceptual link to populism as a strategy), in some instances associated with the concepts astroturfing (Schill, 2014) and front groups (Mayer, 2015).Footnote 9 Climate change is one of the most-studied examples of this elite backing (Farrell, 2016; Oreskes & Conway, 2011). That assistance includes populist stylistic and performative aspects, including the way they present or perform the antagonism (Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy, 2017); and the way they perform or ‘argue’ their problems and solutions. While a rumor or conspiracy theory may have obscure origins, issuing from someone with no public persona, promoters, and organizers may discover it and utilize it in more professional and systematic ways, even allowing it to be a major part of a group’s political identity (e.g. the ‘birthers’).

In addition, not only do some cases of populism demonstrate elite roles in them; elites have given many problematic right-wing populisms their rhetorical ‘playbook,’ which populists imitate, perhaps even unconsciously, given how normalized elite political styles and strategies have become across the twentieth century. Their rhetorical strategies, including emotional appeals, formal-aesthetic qualities, and thematic repertoires can be seen to have elite origins, even if they have intensified their dramatic qualities and thus draw more scrutiny. The well-documented disrespect for experts, including scientists; and the well-documented populist use of simplistic emotional appeals and arguments in studies and media treatments across Europe and North America, especially—all of these ‘epistemic’ aspects that scholars are documenting in right-wing populisms can be found at the very center of liberal democratic politics. They have been there for several decades, and thus, instead of being endemic to populism, they are just as likely imitations of mainstream politics.

Moreover, populists are frequently seen as being not just anti-science, but anti-media/-journalism, yet here, too, elites have arguably set the stage for them. In the 1960s the U.S. Republican party decided on a new and enduring strategy: to go on the offensive against the news media. Thus, they launched the strategy of labeling and attacking the dishonest, even ‘lying’ ‘liberal media’ (Feldstein, 2010, 2016; Greenberg, 2008; Levy, 2013; Schoen, 2016). While one can find examples of the practice elsewhere in the world before that point, this was a systematic, ongoing strategy and practice. The point was to discredit preemptively any particular public truth claim unfavorable to them by discrediting the source and thus rendering all of their truth claims systematically false. This U.S. Republican political strategy has been successfully exported (Albertini, 2015; Brauck, 2016). Thus, the Front National used the same strategy as do now other high-profile right-wing parties such as Alternative für Deutschland, who speak of the lügenpresse (lying media, by some accounts associated with the anti-democratic context of Nazism; Noack, 2021; see also Conrad, in this volume).

In fact, political consultants advise elite clients to execute a battery of deceptive techniques and anti-logical styles of communication that some populists are rightly criticized for: non-sequiturs, ad hominems, and other fallacies, evading questions, emotional appeals, simplistic problem, and solution frames—these come from elite mainstream politics and are advised by elite political consultants (Aberdein, 2022; Blassnig et al., 2019). Many right-wing populists are also rightly criticized for their implicit and explicit racism. Once again, this has been perfected in more subtle elite political communication codes or ‘dog whistles,’ such as Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy,’ and Ronald Reagan’s fictitious but rhetorically efficacious trope of the ‘Cadillac-driving welfare queen’ (Bonikowski & Zhang, 2023; Haney-López, 2014; Levin, 2019). While some scholars (Mazzoleni, 2014; Mudde, 2004) have claimed that efficacious populist style has authorized more mainstream politics to imitate it less ‘rudely,’ just the opposite could be said: mainstream factually disinterested political rhetoric and strategy has authorized ‘ruder’ popular imitations.

When we focus on all of these epistemic faults of right-wing populisms but don’t acknowledge that they are common to elite political communication, we ignore part of the cause and risk implying the false solution of re-programming populists with correct ‘information,’ or quarantining that same ‘information.’ Mainstream politicians and parties are constantly treating citizens instrumentally, certainly not as people for whom their main job is to deliver clear and useful ‘information’ and/or evidence-based arguments in the service of public opinion formation and voting. This point is too often glossed over in reference to ‘spin doctors’ and politicians’ penchant for lying or diversion; in fact, it is much more organized, systematic, and can rightly be framed as anti-democratic—uninterested in dialogue, in rational critical argumentation, and in considering a plurality of perspectives. The point is so underemphasized in the literature that it bears some exposition.

Political Consulting: Elite Models of Epistemic Populism

Many highly visible overviews of disinformation and misinformation that catch the attention of populism studies (Kapantai et al., 2021; Lazer et al., 2018; Tucker et al., 2018) fail to mention political consultants or strategists. However, upon closer examination, (elite) political consulting is at the center of public epistemic problems.

For example, Michael Serazio’s interview-based research of political consultants is particularly revealing of the casual view this elite profession (and elites who can afford to hire them) have of public facts and political discourse. As Serazio summarizes, consultants’ ‘impoverish ‘facts and details’’ and are ‘not even interested in formal, conscious deliberation from the audiences addressed if feelings can be conjured first to short-circuit’ reasoning processes. Serazio provides an illuminating if troubling context for the measured distrust of politicians and parties publicized by surveys when he concludes: ‘[C]onsultants speak of the need to co-opt ‘real people’ in a political ‘unreality’ where they ‘just as often betray truth as reveal it’ (2018, p. 15). And when he writes: ‘Consultants may well feel that campaigns don’t need to be accountable to ‘independent facts’ if voters adrift in a fragmented information environment won’t necessarily hold them accountable.’ Uncanny now is his 2014 prediction of post-truth politics, when he and his interviewee, respectively, remark, ‘For that reason, one direct mail and opposition research head fears that this is a ‘slippery slope’ that could culminate ‘50 years from now, [where] politics could be this kind of cartoonish reality, where facts don't matter’ (2014, p. 757). When we talk about populism as a strategy, a performance, or a core idea, ought we not ask the question of whether elite political strategists and performers themselves performed this antagonism and also helped build a post-truth political culture that populists are said to be at home in, as if their discursive epistemic qualities are ‘marginal’ and becoming mainstream?

Historical evidence abounds that elites have actually employed this venerable antagonism smart elite/dumb people (Borch, 2013) to strategize and execute politics in increasingly expensive professional ways for over a century now. One of the most influential elitist elites, special counsel to several U.S. presidents, strategist for American tobacco as well as the CIA, the founder of modern public relations, Edward Bernays opened his 1928 classic, Propaganda, with these retrospectively chilling words: ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’ Likewise, his contemporary Walter Lippmann observed that democracy had ‘turned a corner,’ due to new ‘psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication’ as the ‘organ of modern government.’ He hesitated, ‘None of us begins to understand the consequences, but prophesied that it would alter ‘every political calculation and modify every political premise’ (1922, p. 248). Lippmann’s view is characterized by a resigned realism toward these seismic developments that, arguably, lead in a direct line to Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the latter two characterized for their notorious populism.

Recent histories of political consulting trace an arc ending in post-truth politics. Johnson documents the twentieth-century publicity agent crossing over from commercial to political sectors in the U.S., before going global (Johnson, 2017, ch. 18), while Sheingate writes that ‘the success of a [political] publicity campaign hinged at least in part on the public’s inability to distinguish between the objective presentation of facts and the subjective manipulation of information to appear fact-like,’ which ‘has also contributed to an ambivalence many Americans express toward politics that is still evident today’ (p. 14; see also Harsin, 2023; Johnson, 2017). In populism studies, we are accustomed to reading that populists play fast and loose with facts, but we perhaps hear less frequently that such behavior has long been systematic in the U.S. thanks to elites blazing the trail, and has been exported globally (Boynton, 2006; Harding, 2008; Lees Marshment et al., 2010; Ong & Cabañes, 2019; Scammell, 2014).

While there are theoretical and epistemic blind spots perceptible in researchers’ (not just in populists they study) use of the widely accepted ideational definition of populism, epistemic populism studies succumb to an additional temptation. Consequentially, for considerations of a post-truth/populism relationship, the recent ‘epistemic turn’ in populism studies tends to reduce communication’s rhetorical functions to mere information (as knowledge) exchange, or to information as behavioralist stimulus. This is particularly a problem for a theory of post-truth that also insists that anxiety about fragile public facts is often due to the rhetorical forms that encompass and present them.

Epistemic Populism

These epistemological emphases would indicate a new turn in populism studies, on the heels of the ‘discursive’ and ‘performative’ turns. There is certainly a contemporary interdisciplinary scholarly concern with epistemic features of certain populisms (especially far right versions). However, as Müller notes, the growing literature on epistemic or ‘epistemological populism’ (Saurette & Gunster, 2011) has been ‘less concerned with giving an overarching account of populism, but more so with carving out the epistemic dimension of specific populist movements across countries’ (2023, p. 7). While some studies take a strong theoretical stance, claiming that all populisms appeal to the superior knowledge of ‘common people,’ many simply refer to disinformation/misinformation and false belief that is a facet or driver of the particular case of populism under analysis. Epistemic populism studies refer to problematic counterknowledges and false beliefs in their objects of analysis, but they rarely account for how broader cultural infrastructures play a role in structuring those agents and why, more granularly, rhetorically, certain expressions of false beliefs are appealing. They consistently use methods that take the form for granted, assuming that it is the ideational content itself that persuades (survey, experimental, and content analysis methods are dominant).Footnote 10

Nawrocki’s recent overview of epistemic populist research summarizes the features of the epistemic turn in populism studies (2023). He observes that scholars have been drawn to the way ‘populist movements construct and nurture ‘alternative’ knowledge systems and [that]visions of what is factual and true has become extremely relevant for scholars of populism…Numerous studies describe populists as spreading misinformation, distributing fake news, sowing doubt over man-made climate crisis or the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and profiting from conspiracy theories that often thrive in social media, incessantly repeated and reinforced in information bubbles and echo chambers (2023, p. 2). Many studies are concerned with a ‘rejection of the truth-speaking sovereignty of science,’ dubbed its ‘epistemic objection,’ valuing personal over scientific knowledge, though ‘it has been rarely deployed systematically by political actors labelled as populists’ (2023, p. 9). Notice, in the context of Arendt’s theorization of public truth or publicly accepted facts, speaking of ‘truth-speaking sovereignty of science’ already would suggest a misunderstanding about how validity functions in the public realm versus the realm of scientific argumentation. In this vein that imagines a kind of rigid empirical and epistemological binary elites/people and a simple conception of post-truth as relativism, Waisbord asserts that ‘[p]opulism rejects the possibility of truth as a common normative horizon and collective endeavour in democratic life’ (in Müller, 2023, p. 5) and ‘argues that for populists, ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ hold their own versions of truth.’ However, as Müller (2023) notes, while it may seem like populists are relativists in that scholars (and others) find their truth claims to be unjustified convictions, it seems they are making truth claims that would have to appeal to a standard beyond their own community when they claim, for example, that an elite (exists and) is corrupt. ‘The very notion of a corrupted elite seems to imply that there is a shared moral framework from which the elite is deviating wrongfully’ (p. 5). We have to look elsewhere, beyond common explanations of relativism if we are to understand more rigorously the hot couple, post-truth, and populism.

In a recent review of the literature on misinformation and disinformation, Broda and Strömback conclude that ‘the field is mostly data-driven, frequently investigating the prevalence, dissemination, detection or characteristics of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news’ (2024). Their discussion shows the research privileges experimental, survey, and content analysis methods. Like disinformation/misinformation studies overall, epistemic populism studies eschew performance and style, and since I have argued that post-truth politics, and the problem of fragile public facts at its center, is dependent on trust performance and -granting, this raises a problem for understanding any possible connection between the conceptual pair. The analytical effect of such epistemic populism studies is understandable given that performance evaporates in the methods of information-centered analyses of deceptive communication. Epistemic populists’ methods, authorized by the ideational definition at the expense of the performative or rhetorical approaches, tend to treat political rhetoric as mere transmission of information (ideas/facts/data—ordinary definitions are a circular deferral). I call this reduction of the formal, compositional, performative agency of communication (linguistic or multi-modal/audio-, visual) ‘infocentrism.’ It devitalizes communication and treats it as information, knowledge, or ideas. ‘Informationizing’ the phenomenon misrecognizes the truth/trust/form entanglement, and a corrective would be to think about the epistemic in terms of the rhetorical aspects of populist communication. In the rest of the chapter, I will focus on the problem of communication reduced to information in epistemic populism studies and implied theory.

Epistemic Populism’s ‘Informationalization’ of Populist Rhetoric

Epistemic populism studies too often commit the error that communication theory long ago identified in its own flawed models: communication is not reducible to information transmitted by senders to receivers through a channel, in an electrical engineering model. ‘Information,’ or ‘facts’ are always presented, so the critique goes, and their form and epistemology cannot be fruitfully separated in an account of why epistemically flawed communication is appealing, if not persuasive.

Emphasizing communication’s etymological descent from the Latin communicare, to share or hold in common, the intellectual historian John Durham Peters has explained in his account of the dictionary and popular reduction of communication to information exchange: ‘in both the statistical and popular senses, [information] comes in bits.’ Further, it has ‘no ‘intertextuality’ or ‘grammar,’ and most of the time comes in the form of ‘tables, lists, charts.’ While one may weave stories that include it, one can ‘no more weave stories out of it than one can weave a braid of sand.’ In fact, it ‘has no real status,’ yet ‘it has great pretensions to being objective or substantial’ (1987, p. 15). Humans use language and symbolic expression to ‘cajole, wheedle, seduce, hate, politic, assert, perform, and of course, promise,’ Peters continues. Human communication ‘creates worlds, it is not only about the world ‘outside’ (1987, p. 15). Populist communication is hardly an exception.

Disinformation/misinformation studies, like cognitive psychology, tend to treat language or multi-modal symbol use as ‘an information processor.’ This is a crude reduction, for ‘language does; not transmit (or if it does, that is the least of its functions….A conception of language as information processor denigrates the ways that language shapes and structures consciousness rather than just provides it with content’ (my emphasis; Peters, 1987, p. 15; also Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

Disinformation and misinformation are, in populism and post-truth studies, defined as false information, thus reducing the more complex form and context of communication processes to information processing. This leads to scholars showing what ‘information’ does by isolating and labeling statements false and then showing how naïve people are exposed to (or ‘infected’ by) them, the success of which is partially determined by a person’s ‘pre-existing condition’ (their limited knowledge, schemas, psychological vulnerabilities). Along the way, the term post-truth is mentioned as a kind of scenery.

But post-truth, I’ve argued, develops to an important degree from distrust in all major social and political institutions and processes, as well as, in many societies, in each other. While truth claims in public life were always mediated, and always appeared in narrative contexts, there was more measurable generalized trust in these institutions’ truth-tellers. Distrust has personalized the performance of truth-telling, which must re-produce its credibility in each instance of performance (each new X/Twitter post, each new image-meme, each video, article, or quotation in an article or video, which mediate live performances such as speeches, interviews, golfing…), putting extra emphasis on style and form as ‘truthbearers.’ But epistemic populism studies suppress form or abstracts from it to showcase examples of epistemic failures. In doing so, it commits the error of assuming that form does not shape the epistemic content and is not what makes the overall content appealing to those consuming or encountering it. Such an epistemic approach forgets Arendt’s lessons about public truth. Public facts do not appear to us transparently, formlessly, so that presentation doesn’t matter; they lack the coercion of obvious mathematical truths.

Some scholars taking the performative turn in populism studies have emphasized the importance of trust performance in populist collective identity formation. That is, ‘political appeals are public manifestations of recognisable social aspects of the self in society (as well as of its desires) that contribute to creating a social sense of trust based on an assumption of sameness, or coded understanding’ (Panizza & Stavrakakis, 2020, p. 36). Several scholars in this corner of the field have discussed the crucial performance of ‘authenticity,’ especially the role of emotion in it (for example: Dubrofsky, 2016; Enli, 2015; Harsin, 2017, 2018b, 2021; Kreiss, 2017; Sorensen, 2021).Footnote 11 This form-sensitive approach is likely the strongest common ground with post-truth theory; in other words, one needs to think more rhetorically or formally about public epistemology—about the presentation of statements of fact/falsehood.

Populist Forms, Trust, and Public Truth

For decades rhetorical, critical discourse, semiotic, linguistic, and multi-faceted cultural approaches have paid close attention to form, ideology, and potential effects on belief.Footnote 12 More recently, with regard to post-truth and populism, my own work (2017, 2018b, 2021) has focused on the formal and stylistic performances of trustworthiness at the granular level, moving outwards toward cultural and historical as well as media technological constraints and affordances that shape the whole experience of performance. In a recent study, using data from a French populist group’s Facebook posts, I focused on what they framed as ‘gender theory’ policy in French schools. I was able to sort the data and note, for example, emotional appeals (sometimes expressed through ALL CAPS) attached to the popular criticism of, as well as appeal to, specific scientific sources or evidence; as well as their anti-mainstream news position and use of alternative forms of publicity (for example, Youtube). The ethos or credibility of the dominant truth-tellers/posters as micro-celebrities was important, as they coined memorably humorous stage names, such as ‘Frigide Barjot’ (on Brigitte Bardot) or, drew affective power from a reputation in past activism (the latter was the case of a 1970s–80s activist of immigrant rights, Farida Belghoul).

The analysis moved outward onto relations of exclusion in French society, as the majority of the participants in the sub-movement analyzed were immigrants, some of whom were not fluent French speakers. Elite conservative manipulation of these poorer immigrants risked reinforcing broader public views of the immigrants as ‘epistemically’ inferior, no doubt drawing suspicion from even more moderate citizens.

In a more recent study (Harsin, 2021), I theorized relationships between trust theory (e.g. Möllering, 2001; Simmel, 2004), post-truth politics, and masculinity, whereby the performance of ‘toxic’ masculine traits of aggressiveness and schadenfreude were trust-makers that could conceivably secure acceptance of false narratives and statements (indeed, in this dynamic, trust-makers become truth-makers). The case study was Donald Trump, though I noted important global variations in men like Bolsonaro, Modi, and Duterte. Their performance of trustworthiness that potentially authorized belief was evidenced, visually and bodily, in lurking, eye-rolling, and interruption; orally by interruption, insults, and talking over another; and figuratively in hyperbole and threat, which was also demonstrated in tweets (again, with features such as ALL CAPS to indicate yelling and screaming) (compare also with Diehl, 2017). I compared this rhetorical analysis to existing ethnographic and interview data on Trump supporters, where they celebrated Trump’s refreshingly apparent honesty to say what others are thinking but are intimidated to say themselves, due to decorum or political correctness. They emphasized the importance of form in producing trust (and likely, acceptance of or disregard for false statements of facts).

Other such form-attentive analyses of post-truth communication include critical discourse studies. In contrast to infocentric approaches to post-truth and populism, for example, consider Wodak’s study of the Austrian People’s Party (2018). Trying critically to understand their persuasive strategies, she emphasizes interpretation that accounts for their coded signaling of ‘chauvinistic and fascist imaginaries’; specific ‘allusions to extreme right and Nazi ideologies,’ which she argues are ‘calculated ambivalence’ that ‘ensures deniability’; the way that their communication shifts between ‘strong’ and ‘soft’ performances that cater to particular contexts and audiences; and systematic attempts to break taboos by re-contextualizing, semiotically, verbally and textually, ‘aspects of extreme-right imaginaries,’ while ‘moving from backstage to frontstage and from party politics to the mainstream’ (2018, pp. 25–26).

Wodak’s study represents a significantly different and arguably richer approach to understanding the dynamics of influence when compared to content analysis-based coding for true/false statements, survey data, experiments, leading to stimulus response conclusions about cognitive bias. Certainly, the form-attentive methods are inevitably incomplete; they are usually not based on interviews, ethnographic, or survey data, the latter of which would help round out analyses and theorizing about rhetorical influence, and interpretive methods like this are always enriched by the work of other formal analysts on the same set of objects. But it is probably just this kind of research combined with the other methods that will give a fuller picture of the dynamics of deceptive appeal. And they will certainly show the dangers of reducing such complex communication to the transfer of information (factual and false), from a sender to a receiver, via a channel.

Conclusion

Arguing that the dictionary definition of post-truth is highly problematic, I’ve proposed instead that post-truth:

  1. 1.

    is best understood as an anxiety about the potential impossibility of publicly accepted facts (the demise of public facts signaling the end-game for democracy of any sort); and

  2. 2.

    is only unrigorously reducible to its various constituents, predominantly named ‘fake news,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘misinformation.’

Both post-truth and epistemic populism studies often take ‘information’ problems as their object of study and ‘statements’ as their unit of analysis. And both tend to overlook the rhetorical aspects of what is taken as an epistemic problem (knowledge, truth, justified true belief).

Paradoxically, epistemic populist studies tend at once to ascribe great and limited importance to populists’ rhetoric. They show that populists’ simplistic construction of elites/people is often based on empirical misunderstandings and inaccuracies, yet, in choice of methods and ensuing analysis, they devitalize that self-same rhetoric to epistemically flawed statements of fact (i.e. ‘information’), mostly ignoring the immediate presentation of facts (or falsehoods) that make them more or less appealing to populists and to the rest of us. This reduction not only deprives epistemic populism studies of a richer understanding of populist rhetoric’s appeal, but also forecloses closer theoretical bridges with post-truth political studies, since the latter depends on the constant rhetorical performance of trust in truth-tellers.