Listening to accounts of the fall-out from the UK government’s latest debacle around A-Level, GCSE and BTEC examination grades, I find myself struck by how we continue to be amazed at the extraordinary incompetence of Boris Johnson and his colleagues - and their equally extraordinary ability to get away with denials, obfuscations and lies. This is the most striking feature of today’s political populists: they are completely indifferent to truth and falsehood. The very notions of lying and incompetence are absent from their worlds.
Obvious examples beyond the UK include Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Narendra Modi and their responses to the coronavirus - responses that are entirely independent of anything that might actually be the case, as well as being unconcerned about their internal contradictions. How should we understand what’s going on, and how did it come about? The answers to those questions require some serious self-reflection.
One way that populism needs to be understood is through its attitude to language, and specifically how the ways in which it uses language have nothing to do with understanding, explaining, agreeing or disagreeing. Instead, it mirrors how language is used and understood by frustrated young children and all sorts of fantasists, bullies and abusers. That’s why the truth-free nature of this language is no barrier to popularity among those who use it in a similar way, which is to say, as a weapon. But where does this come from?
