Struggles for believability: from rape victims to senators, dictators, and news brands

Abstract

One of the rare uncontested contemporary public facts is that especially Western academic and popular discourse became preoccupied with problematizing public untruth, misbelief, and distrust in the wake of Brexit, Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic, a conjuncture more controversially referred to as “post-truth politics.” Three diverse books under review here can be gingerly approached under that post-truth banner, so long as it means a public anxiety about the possibility of securing publicly accepted facts (as opposed to, say, Oxford dictionaries’ definition). Considering them together affords us a broader global and deeper historical, social, and psychological perspective on the conjuncture. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s Wrong encourages us to see what appears as a perplexing polarization of politics and entrenched (mis)beliefs as, instead, a distilled product of media-economic logics and the political exploitation of basic psychological needs for agency, control, comprehension, and/or community. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins’ Believability—engaging with the post-#MeToo and post-truth political entanglements—explores how disbelief in factual accounts has always been reserved for women and other structurally demoted truth-tellers in historically specific “economies of believability”. In Spin Dictators, meanwhile, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Triesman draw attention to shifting styles of dictatorship, from bloodily repressive autocratic and totalitarian historical examples—the test cases of Arendt’s proto-post-truth politics around the “fragility” of public facts—to something more liberal-democratic in terms of style and strategy.