A guard of honour awaits PM Theresa May at the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ahead of talks in Ankara. January 2, 2017.Christopher Furlong/Press Association. All rights reserved.When I began writing about conspiracy theory in Turkey the term post-truth had not yet been coined. Nor, for that matter, had anyone heard of 'truthiness', or even 'alternative facts'. The idea that politics was inherently conspiratorial, at times truthful, at others not, was unquestioned, and not something worth paying any particular attention to. As a relative outsider, the more excentric and at times absurd, manifestations of Turkish political rhetoric were both fascinating and disorienting. Yet for all the apparent difference in rhetorical style, I suspected that both in the US and Turkey, politicians enjoyed playing a game of what Hofstadter referred to in the 1960s, as ' the paranoid style', in which accusations, however absurd, are used for populist gain. I began to understand how conspiracy theories in Turkish politics serve to systematically reinforce and mobilise longstanding grievances and various imagined communities. As part of my research, I began to catalogue the various conspiracy theories in the post-Gezi political environment.So the recent surge in public attention to the idea of post-truth politics in the US, the UK, and Europe, has both taken me by surprise, yet also confirmed my own suspicions. Particularly, it confirmed that what may have appeared to be a specific Turkish eccentricity was in fact part of a global rejection of so-called rational and deliberative politics. This worrisome trend is one that Turkish academics and indeed Turkish citizens have come to accept as part of their everyday reality. We can learn from their experience. And hopefully, in so doing, better understand and combat the perils of post truth in our own countries.
In fact, my entire reasoning has always rested on the belief that a certain flirtation with the paranoid is at the very heart of the global contestation both detrimental yet vital for a democracy to function despite all its contradictions. After all, to attempt to reconcile the tug of war between a democracy that emphasizes equality over freedom, or vice versa, individual freedom over equality, while somehow guaranteeing both, requires a certain Sisyphean necessity. The sacrifices that are made along the way, and the grievances that ensue, always threaten to provide fertile soil for autocratic opportunism and populist manipulation to take root.
There exists indeed, buried within the very experience of democracy, an ongoing negotiation of truth(s), which for the sake of democracy, should never be fully reconciled. In other words, for a democracy to flourish requires both challenging antagonist simplifications, while at the same time resisting the temptation to enforce and regulate the supposed empirical purity, or one form of truth, that ought to be inherently progressive. To set out on such a path, is inherently to invite a populist backlash, and in many ways our current predicament can be traced back as much to third way liberalism, or Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy of the 1990s as it is due to the bizarre antics of Trump's popular persona.
