Many have recently offered their opinions on why Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the November election. Inflation, the economy, and uncontrolled immigration are often named as causes. Those issues concerned many voters. As Democrats ponder what’s next, there’s talk about either a need to return to issues that concern working class and rural people, as Bernie Sanders argues, or to move toward the center, as others suggest.

Republicans, too, are discussing the future of their party. I’d like to focus on an entirely different topic: post-truth politics.

Early in Donald Trump’s first term as president, his counselor, Kellyanne Conway, spoke of “alternative facts,” shorthand not for facts, but for lies, like the exaggerated size of the crowds at Trump’s first inauguration. Many lies came before this, and since then, too:

Barack Obama having been born in Ghana and not being eligible for the presidency (birtherism); Pizzagate, a supposed pedophilia ring run by Hillary Clinton out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor; the belief that vaccines cause autism; QAnon beliefs; the “stolen” 2016 election (the Big Lie); climate change denial; school age children going to school one gender and coming home a different gender after surgery in school; an accelerating crime wave during Biden’s last two years in office (when crime rates were dropping significantly); and immigrants stealing and eating family pets.

These are just a few of many examples of what is called post-reality politics. All the above lies are false and yet, taken as a whole, are believed to be true by a significant number of Americans. How many believe is hard to know. Belief in these lies may have affected the outcome of the election.

In 2004, Ron Suskind, a reporter, quoted an unnamed George W. Bush administration aide as stating that people like Suskind were “in what we call the reality-based community,” (people who) “believe that solutions emerge from your ... study of discernible reality. … That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities … and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This describes the post-reality world we now inhabit.

Post-reality when referring to our politics is often called post-truth politics. In the Wikipedia entry on post-truth politics I accessed on Dec. 29, 2024, it states: “scholars use the term “post-truth situation” to refer to such “a situation in society and politics, in which the boundary between truth and untruth is erased, facts and related narratives are purposefully produced, emotions are more important than knowledge and the actors of social or political life do not care for truth, proof and evidence.”

What was simply lying, persuasion, propaganda, and advertising seems to have changed into something completely different enabled by social media, the internet, and other forms of mass communication —“lying on steroids” mixed with emotional appeals to cloud reason and to promote distrust.

But it is more than lying and sowing distrust. The same Wikipedia entry goes on to state that “post-truth is not solely synonymous with lying, fake news or other deception but is about the public anxiety that there is no confident way to secure publicly accepted facts in political culture.”

While others debate whether this is something new, the developing divisiveness and distrust appears to be weakening our society, our government, and our democratic institutions. Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist, famously said in an interview in 1978 in the New York Review of Books, “If everyone always lies to you the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that nobody believes anything any longer … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can do what you please.”

What is to be done?

In Sophia A. Rosenfeld’s book, “Democracy and Truth: A Short History” (2019), she lists solutions for dealing with post-truth politics. She highlights seven potential solutions to the problem: an ethical commitment to truth-telling and fact-checking in public; a proscription against reopening settled debates; a crackdown on disinformation by social media companies; a shift away from free-speech absolutism; protecting the integrity of political institutions; improving information literacy with education; and the support of nonviolent protest against lying and corruption.”

Rosenfeld goes on to describe them as a starting point for addressing the problem. Reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that allows obscene amounts of money to pollute our civic life and elections would also help.

Others are not optimistic that this Pandora’s Box of “lies on steroids” and the distrust and divisiveness they foster, once opened, can again be closed. Unless we find a way to reverse the tide of post-truth politics the resulting chaos, fragmentation, and rise of fascism may repeat its sweep over much of the world.

For a society to thrive, some shared truths are a necessity. Or, as Abraham Lincoln stated, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Richard Brunswick is a retired primary care doctor living in Northampton.