https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:06 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/populism-anti-populism-and-post-truth-in-crisis-ridden-greece/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:06 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/populism-anti-populism-and-post-truth-in-crisis-ridden-greece/ Continued]]> The debate around ‘post-truth’ dominated the public space following the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory. Since then one continuously encounters references that connect ‘post-truth’ or ‘fake news’ with populism and present both phenomena as mutually reinforcing pathologies of a supposed political normality. Mainstream politicians and prominent members of the media and the academic establishment seem to claim an epistemic superiority based on the possession of a (single) truth and on incarnating a supreme rationality. The introduction of obsolete debates around truth in the confrontation between political discourses in the public sphere has led to a distinction between populism and post-truth politics, on the one hand, and politics based on facts, rationality, expert knowledge and technocracy, on the other. In Greece the dominant anti-populist discourse proceeded quickly to employ this polemical notion of ‘post-truth’. This paper aims to examine how post-truth politics were conceptualized in Greece, how they became part of the political conflict and how the rubric of post-truth was incorporated into the dominant populism/anti-populism cleavage that marks Greek politics. The Greek case is certainly under-researched as far as the ‘post-truth’ dimension is concerned. Finally, the paper attempts to highlight, through this examination of Greek politics, the political claims related to the polemical use of the concept of ‘post-truth’ in political discourses more generally, i.e. the political implications that can be produced by the inter-connection between populism and posttruth. Last but not least, the paper deals with the status of truth itself in politics. What if every truth is a post-truth? What would this mean for the political conflicts marking our era?

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