Almost eight years ago, the then-Counselor to the President of the United States, Kellyanne Conway, gave an interview on NBC where she sought to defend a statement made by the then-White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, regarding the attendants at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Spicer claimed that they were the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Confronted by evidence that the audience was, in fact, smaller, Conway defended Spicer’s claim as giving “alternative facts.” This was likely a throwaway remark by Conway, but, eight years on, days before Trump’s possible re-election, the concept of alternative facts still perfectly describes the style of politics spearheaded by Trump and parroted by many of his populist admirers. Something that used to lie firmly within the domain of the left — a lack of reverence for objective notions of truth — is now, sadly, a key feature of politics across the political spectrum.

The serious problem with alternative facts, in the way Conway presented them, is that they allow not just for the coexistence of different facts that are all true, but of different “facts” that contradict one another. Spicer’s claim about the numbers at Trump’s inauguration cannot be true if another fact — say, that more people attended Reagan’s inauguration than Trump’s — is true. They are not merely alternative facts – they are contradictory “facts”.

On a common-sense understanding of what fact means – that it represents some objective reality — you cannot have contradicting facts. But this is not the understanding that Trump — probably unconsciously, I doubt that he has a thought-out stance on epistemology – subscribes to. For Trump, facts are primarily what one feels is, or should be, true. And what one feels is completely subjective.

Until recently, such a way of looking at facts was squarely the domain of the left. In 2016, the right-wing rhetorician Ben Shapiro famously maintained that “facts don’t care about your feelings” in an attempt to discredit basing one’s political opinions on how they make one feel. But the right-wing populists of today seem to do just that. Examples are plentiful, but the most impactful one is probably the unsubstantiated but often-repeated claim by Trump that the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen.” 

… some assertions are true and others are not — and, consequently, some opinions are more substantive than others

There is a long-standing tradition of left-wingers being at odds with objective reality. Encouraged by David Hume and Immanuel Kant’s critiques of objective metaphysical reality, as well as by Friederich Nietzsche’s idea that truth is whatever is the most convenient thing to believe, left-wing 20th-century philosophers sought to destroy or “deconstruct” all of objective reality. For Foucault — who diverged from the left in some senses, especially later in his career, but who was a key influence on academic leftism — what is true is not determined by any objective reasons, but rather by what those with power decide to be true. For Baudrillard, truth and reality are illusions. Derrida and Deleuze both broadly agree — indeed, Deleuze thinks that politics precedes truth. This attitude towards truth is even betrayed by the way those philosophers write: they are generally not interested in giving reasons or providing evidence for their claims. Their writing is convoluted and full of repeated assertions designed to invoke a persuasive but ultimately unsubstantiated image. And, although they sometimes suggest ways for comparing competing claims, they do not provide any objective, rational criteria for doing so.

This way of thinking has, sadly, percolated into the mainstream. You may have, at some point in your life, encountered somebody who attempts to rebut a fact claim with something like “that’s just your opinion!” 

But some assertions are true and others are not — and, consequently, some opinions are more substantive than others. If one opinion is based on a valid argument with true premises, or if it is otherwise well-grounded in evidence, then it is a superior opinion to one that does not have such grounding. If there is no way to justify one’s claim with an appeal to objective, rational criteria, then every claim is as good as another. The only reason to prefer one claim to its alternative is because you feel better about it. Perhaps this is why Trump is comfortable to just say whatever he feels like; and increasingly so in the run-up to the election.

However, there is another way of interpreting Trump and his brand of populism. Perhaps, rather than being an unconscious postmodernist, he he has adopted a bastardised form of anti-rationalism: conservatism, that is, in the tradition of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott or Roger Scruton, which is sceptical about abstract, rationalistic, hypothetical reasoning, and so puts a premium on “common sense”. Our inherited intuitions are a source of practical wisdom and a more reliable guide to good government, Burke argues. And perhaps it is those very intuitions that are the guiding force for Trump’s seemingly irrational claims.

The crucial difference between Trump and anti-rationalist sceptics such as Burke, however, is that Burke’s position commits one to the preservation of institutions, cultures and traditions that are the source of those wise inherited intuitions. Trump is interested in no such thing. Instead, he continuously seeks to tear down established American political traditions, destroy or revolutionise long-standing American institutions and has already radically transformed American political culture.

The populist right and the post-modern left are, in a way, two sides of the same coin. They both favour assertion over argument, the emotional over the rational. They are the poets from Plato’s Republic — rhetoricians who have no love for investigating the truth but only for how things intuitively appear and feel. But this is no way to run a state. Policies need to be based on evidence, not vibes. Shapiro, for all his faults, was right when he said that facts don’t care about your feelings. Politics needs to rediscover a love for truth — not for what sounds good.