By Kregg Hetherington
The idea that we might be entering a “post-truth” era is a crisis for liberal democracies because it reveals the tenuousness of a proposition that many people in North America and Europe have taken for granted, at least since the end of the Cold War. For the sake of argument, I’ll call that proposition “truth politics.” It claims that the appropriate way of governing a population is with recourse to empirically verifiable facts. Part of the difficulty with understanding the Trump phenomenon, and its correlates in other Western democracies, is how suddenly it has revealed the positionality, and the fragility, of this proposition. The rabbit hole this opens is deep for believers in truth politics, since it undermines the very tools for thinking critically about politics at all. What we assumed to be the ethical standard governing the realm of political debate turns out to be part of the debate itself, one position among many others in a realm whose standards are suddenly up for question.
From the outside, however, the situation is less strange, and it’s therefore useful to think about places and times where truth politics is not taken-for-granted. Paraguay is one of those countries that staunchly refuses to conform basic liberal assumptions about truth in government. Continue reading “The End of Truth Politics in Paraguay”