We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
—The Declaration of Independence
Truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order cannot[. . . provide a] basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society.
—John Rawls
Immediately after Donald Trump took the president’s office for the first time in 2017, the hostilities between his administration and the media evolved into a conflict about facts or truth. Tensions ran high well before Inauguration Day, for the incoming president had campaigned with what many interpreted as a discourse of bullshit, in the strict philosophical sense of the term—that is showing no interest in truth or falsity. But at some point, it became increasingly clear that Trump was moving frombullshit to a system of organized lying. Kellyanne Conway’s claim that the White House would provide “alternative facts” is now remembered as a symbolic moment; the term she coined perseveres as Trumpism outlasts Trump’s presidency. Her later justification of the Muslim ban by invoking a nonexistent “BowlingGreen Massacre” signaled that the situation was escalating, as did Steve Bannon’s denunciation of the media as the “opposition party” to what Trump called “the movement.”Soon thereafter, the president himself tweeted that the media, insisting as it did on truth, was not his enemy but the “enemy of the American people.”
Mainstream media retaliated swiftly with aggressive moves of their own. Newspapers started bringing their fact-checking procedures, which previously remained behind the scenes, ostentatiously to the fore. By now, it is common practice for news outlets to print such titles as “Fact Check: President Trump’s First Week” or “Fact Check: President Biden’s Address to Congress.” As if to threaten with strategic weapons, The New York Times announced in 2017 that it had reconsidered its unwritten “L-word” policy. Previously, editors at the Times maintained that lying depended on an internal state of mind—an intention to deceive—that could not be verified. Accordingly, they preferred terms such as“falsehoods,” “untruths,” or “errors” instead of “lies.” Ever since Trump was elected, however, the verb “to lie” has been printed. The Times also ran for long months this advertising slogan: “Truth. It’s vital to democracy. No alternatives, just facts. Get up to 40% off the Times subscription of your choice.” In a similar vein, after the January 6th storming of the Capitol, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which were scolded for spreading misinformation, suspended and even permanently banned activists’ accounts—including that of the outgoing president.
This crusade in the name of facts says it all. It shows not just how fragile truth is in liberal democracy but what truth’s limits are: As facts are fervently defended, the idea of justice is depleted of authority. To be sure, the media’s campaign in defense of facts certainly is vital to democracy. But we should notice how keen news outlets have been to declare a holy epistemological war. Arguably, the sanctification of facts serves to conceal deeper questions about truth and its relation to politics, to subdue the suspicion that truth in a more meaningful sense of the term has been suppressed. When Trump labeled the liberal media as the “enemy of the people,” many were outraged. But the relation between truth and politics is more complex than his liberal opponents would like to concede. Not just populist nationalist politicians are attacking truth with weaponized “fake facts”; not just post-modern leftists, equipped with the latest theory of postcolonialism or critical race. When politics is not about facts but about justice—when moral truth contradicts comfortable consensus—modern liberals treat truth as just that: the enemy of the people.
“Take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.” Richard Rorty liked repeating this slogan to capture the essence of modern liberalism. The idea is to radicalize religious toleration by an overriding principle of state neutrality. Thomas Jefferson once said of religion, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no God.” For the author of the Declaration of Independence, it was necessary to privatize faith to preserve the authority of truth: All men are equal, regardless of religion. Modern liberalism might seem at first to extend Jefferson’s principle by privatizing not just faith but truth itself. In the same way that the state ought not impose a religion on its citizens, it has no right to promote a concept of justice. Just as politics was freed from the authority of God, it was also “liberated” from the authority of truth: not merely factual truth but truth understood as an independent principle of justice that stands above the will of the people. On a second look, this isn’t a radicalization of Jefferson’s principle but goes directly against it. While religion was privatized to affirm the authority of truth, the privatization of truth undermines its very authority. Liber-alism thus consists, to use another apt slogan by Rorty, in the“priority of democracy to philosophy.
Another way to understand this transition is to notice that while Jeffersonian toleration sacrificed the Mosaic distinction(the claim that there is no God but God) in the name of the Abrahamic distinction (the claim that there is only the authority of justice), modern liberalism sacrificed both. Whereas the Declaration of Independence averred an absolute principle of a justice that is not man-made and politics must follow, modern liberalism celebrates a “new conception of what it is to be human” and has“no room for obedience to a nonhuman authority.” In other words, the only absolute principle is human will.
The most effective way to undermine the impact of truth on politics is not to attack facts but to fetishize them. Wittgenstein famously claimed that “the world is the totality of facts,” and deduced from this claim that, in the world, “everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: init no value exists.” In a world exhausted by facts, “it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics”: All meaningful statements are of “equal value,” so ethics “cannot be put into words.” The point is not so much that propositions such as “all men are created equal” aren’t confirmed by facts; it is that they can be neither confirmed nor falsified by them. Once facts are elevated as the model of meaningful assertions, therefore, ethical propositions are degraded to, at best, myths, ideologies, or subjective opinions. Strictly speaking, they are deemed nonsensical. Liberalism, as we have come to know it is so comfortable with this fact fetish for the same reason that it goes against Kant’s idea of humanity and returns to the positivist Enlightenment that preceded him—it lives only where duty to moral truth has been replaced by consensus, interest, and opinion.
To appreciate the predicament that is caused by this replacement, it is worth considering the relation between truth and politics more generally. While politics is the realm in which powers and wills are negotiated, truth is indifferent to the influence of both: Not even the most powerful of tyrants nor the most legitimate of democracies could decide that two plus two equals five. If truth ever does influence politics, therefore, it can only be imposed on the political realm from without. In political terms, the question is whether human powers, wills, and authorities should be guarded not just by constitutions, checks and balances, and international treaties—they all belong to the political realm and bend to its principles—but also determined by truth’s external authority. Tyrants’ obsessive aspiration to undermine truth is due to their inability to accept any such external imposition on their wills. But before we get too comfortable with the familiar comparisons—from Hitler to Stalin, from Trump to Putin, from Fascism to Nazism—it’s worth noticing that modern liberalism relates to truth much like tyrants do: by rejecting its authority over the sovereign’s will—in this case, the people’s. A “new concept of man” that rejects “all obedience to nonhuman authority” may sound like an emancipatory progress of secular Enlightenment modernity, but it leaves one wondering on what authority disobedience to human authority can ever be pursued. Hans Frank, Bavaria’s minister of justice and Reichsminister under Hitler, once formulated the totalitarian relation to truth thus: “as the pursuit of knowledge is the service of truth, it must necessarily be service to National-Socialism.” To oppose this totalitarian formula, the authority of truth must remain independent. It is hardly a good idea to accept Frank’s logic and only replace “National-Socialism ”with “democracy.” This is exactly what the celebrated “priority of democracy to philosophy” and the “new concept of man” have to offer.
From Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity Used with permission of the publisher, New York Review of Books. Copyright © 2025 by Omri Boehm.
