The observation that societies have grown sceptical about ‘grand narratives’ was made well over three decades ago (Lyotard 1984). Recently, however, this broad scepticism has found a keener form in the arena of contemporary politics, which have been described as taking place in a ‘post-truth’ era. This idea of post-truth has spread rapidly; the Oxford dictionary famously declared it their word of the year for 2016, for example. Within research discussions, the phrase ‘post-truth’ is used to describe a mode of politics that operates more through appeals to emotion and personal belief than to verifiable facts (Lynch 2017). As Lynch went on to argue, however, although the term itself may be relatively new, this kind of political rhetoric is not: similar rhetoric can be traced back at least a quarter of a century to the Reagan administration, and the tactics they used to ensure the plausible deniability for the president in relation the Iran-contra scandal.

However, the widespread effects of post-truth rhetoric on contemporary politics have been profound, seeming to free politicians from the burden of being well-informed, accurate or even honest. Sismondo (2017) has argued that it no longer seems to matter whether politicians are lying, so long as the positions that they espouse are consistent with those of their audience. It has even been suggested that raising the question of whether political claims are ‘true’ simply misses the point:

An ascendant view among Trump’s critics is that charges of ‘bullshit’ might be more apt than of lies and lying, since the latter charges presume specific intent and awareness rather than a more constant tendency to exaggerate and deceive, sometimes for no apparent reason. (Lynch 2017: 594)

From this perspective, it becomes relatively easy to see why ‘fact checking’ has begun to look like a partisan act, one that is particularly mistrusted by Republicans in the USA (Shin and Thorson 2017). When discussions operate to out-manoeuvring the opposition, demanding evidence for or against a statement no longer seems like a legitimate move. Instead, questioning the evidence base for a statement looks more like an attempt to undermine the rules of a political ‘game’ that is utterly disengaged from questions of truth or knowledge. However, even though there may be no way to establish what the precise motives for or against particular political claims might have been, it is still possible and productive to look at the effects of political rhetoric in terms of power, to reveal how it can be persuasive, coercive and constitutive of political reality, and how it intersects with established power relations (Krebs and Jackson 2007).

These shifting political realities and power plays are not only visible in US politics, but can also be seen in places like Europe and Australia. In Britain, for example, during a television interview in 2016, Michael Gove famously avoided answering questions about whether any economists backed the idea of ‘Brexit’ (Britain’s exit from the European Union) by asserting that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. Here, Gove was specifically undermining the power of what he described as ‘people from organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’.

Just as post-truth politics are not new, this scepticism about expertise also has a long history. A century earlier, for example, Henry Ford made clear his position on employing experts:

None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. […] The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

However, the contemporary effect of this has a politically aligned shift in what Kelkar (2019) has described as the media ecosystem: in the USA, for example, the journalists and academics who might conventionally describe themselves as ‘experts’ on the basis of their commitment to objectivity are predominantly left-of-centre in their own politics; the conservative response to this systemic bias has been to create an alternative array of think tanks and media to provide other kinds of information that address their preferred public. In the context of educational policy, in the UK, USA and Australia, think tanks and ‘edu-business’ have had a growing influence, while that of academic expertise and evidence has declined (Thompson, Savage and Lingard 2016).

When analysed in terms of power dynamics, the desire of vested interests to ignore ‘inconvenient truths’ (Gore 2006) is hardly surprising. However, this is not just a simple binary setting power against knowledge; the very idea of ‘expertise’ is itself political, creating inequalities of power that render equal debates between those identified as experts and others impossible (Forss and Magro 2016). Forss and Magro go on to argue that expertise is typically linked to state or industrial funding, usually involves dissent and debate, and is fallible. These structural asymmetries, together with failures to predict important events such as the global financial crisis (as Gove alluded to), illustrate why blame has increasingly been directed towards experts themselves. Doing this, however, presupposes that they ever had the ability to do anything more or other than give the advice they did; it ignores, for example, the ways in which their expertise was made available to, misrepresented for or hidden from policy-makers and the wider public, as well as the ways in which others choose to interpret that evidence—or ignore it.

These more nuanced accounts of expertise are helpful in bring perspective to this analysis. If expertise is as Forss and Magro suggest fallible and debatable, then it is only prudent to have a degree of scepticism about the claims of academics. Indeed, caution and prudence are vital to the reflexive, critical position used to justify the idea of academic freedom (Altbach 2001). However, acknowledging this does not justify the further move from prudent scepticism to wholesale rejection. Rather than being a cautious project of constructing knowledge with care, Sismondo (2017: 5) describes the rejection of expertise as a ‘project of creating ignorance, where any disagreement is amplified to try to create a picture of complete dissensus’. In other words, rather than recognising academic challenge and critical doubt as a form of intellectual vigilance, there to test and ultimately strengthen public confidence in knowledge, it is instead portrayed as grounds for radical doubt and suspicion. Rhetorically, this allows anything that is still subject to academic debate to be dismissed if it is politically inconvenient.

This deliberate rhetorical strategy to discredit any area where critique and debate still operate provides a compelling, if disturbing, focus for analysis. It is this debate, as explored in the field of Science and Technology Studies, that will be reviewed next.