It's not just the right wing. The intellectual view that "all speech is about power, not truth" is much more prevalent among the left.
Now, that wasn't a view that was largely held on the right. In fact, I suspect it still isn't. The "post truth" on the right are people who still believe in truth, believe that they have it, and won't listen to any evidence to the contrary. In fact, maybe this is the consequence of the "post truth" left - if the right believes that the left believes what the left says about speech, then the right has no reason to trust any truth claim coming from the left.
But the change may in fact be as you say, that the post-truth people grew on the right. Now you can't sway chunks of either side with facts.
You're absolutely right that there is also a post-truth left, but this thread is focusing on the post-truth right wing. Incidentally, the fix--restoring integrity to epistemological institutions--solves for both the post-truth right and the post-truth left.
I'm not sure it does. The post-truth left is post-truth not because of lack of faith in epstemological institutions, but because of a different epistemology. You can't fix that by a more honest press.
The right... if you had a more honest (or less biased) press, it might fix the post-truth right... eventually. Like, a decade or three later. You have to be trustworthy for a while before people will trust you.
And yet, I wonder if that paragraph is true. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think I can tell when someone's presenting an ideologically varnished version of reality vs. when they're telling it straight. If reporters stopped being cheerleaders and started reporting, maybe people would figure it out faster than I expect.
> I'm not sure it does. The post-truth left is post-truth not because of lack of faith in epstemological institutions, but because of a different epistemology. You can't fix that by a more honest press.
No, I think a more honest press (and other institutions) ceases to reward illegitimate left-wing viewpoints. They have to play the game to get the credibility (and credibility is power) which is exactly what we want. If you want credibility for your tech-gender-parity position, it no longer suffices to make blank slatist arguments because an honest epistemological institution will expose that as anti-science.
> Like, a decade or three later. You have to be trustworthy for a while before people will trust you.
I think this might be true. I think it's a lot harder to earn trust than it is to break it. On the other hand, I think we can stop the bleeding (i.e., stop creating new post-truth people) rather quickly and in time those others will slowly become more moderate and/or more marginal and eventually (like all of us) die out such that our society moderates with time.
Now, that wasn't a view that was largely held on the right. In fact, I suspect it still isn't. The "post truth" on the right are people who still believe in truth, believe that they have it, and won't listen to any evidence to the contrary. In fact, maybe this is the consequence of the "post truth" left - if the right believes that the left believes what the left says about speech, then the right has no reason to trust any truth claim coming from the left.
But the change may in fact be as you say, that the post-truth people grew on the right. Now you can't sway chunks of either side with facts.