Populism, Fake News, and the Flight From Democracy

Abstract

Fake news and populist movements that appear to hold the fate of democracy hostage are urgent concerns around the world.  The flight from liberal democracy toward oligarchy has spread out from the unexpected results of the 2016 American presidential elections bringing in a wave of reactionary populism and the beginning of a left populist counter movement. The phenomenon of fake news is often explained in terms of opposition public relations strategies and geopolitics that shift audiences toward a regime of post-truth where emotion is said to triumphs over reason, computational propaganda over common sense, or sheer power over knowledge. In this chapter, the authors propose something different in order to theorize the imaginary audience(s) and conditions of reception for fake news treated as both a symptom (often of injury) and a cause (at times a danger to democracy). This leads them to evaluate the role it plays in defining what the fields of journalism, politics, and social science are becoming and what it means for democracy to come.