In the heat of the political battle, objective reality is having a tough run | Peter Lewis

What passes as political debate in Australia right now feels like it is careering out of control, a mutinous vessel no longer anchored to facts, context or reality.

Politicians argue about the need to burn coal to allow our privatised electricity network to deal with summer heatwaves, ignoring that increased capacity is caused by a climate change they vehemently deny.

Opponents of marriage equality construct a bizarre postal survey rather than allow parliament to debate legislation and then argue if you don’t know the detail about the protection of religious freedom then you should just vote no.

Laws are rewritten to outlaw industrial activity in the construction industry so that the unions who operate outside these constraints can be demonised as criminals.

Those in the fourth estate who used to arbitrate facts have taken the redundancy cheques; those who remain (present company excepted) too stretched or too compromised to fight for truth.

And all the while the shrill voices on the fringes indulge in what has become an eternal Twitter-fuelled shouting match, reinforced by whatever truths they want to believe.

While the emergence of the bellicose orange-hued blowhard in the White House may represent the zenith of post-truth politics, his is just an exaggeration of what our world had already become.

In a challenging read in September’s Atlantic magazine “How America lost its mind”, Kurt Andersen puts Trump in an historical context that he argues goes to the heart of the American Dream: the right of the individual to believe whatever it is they want.

“The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control,” Andersen argues.

“Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation – small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realised how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.”

Andersen’s America believes in creation and heaven and hell, ghosts and angels, UFOs and extraterrestrial landings; it embraces conspiracy theories on everything from climate change to vaccinations and staunchly defends its rights to hold these views.

And the kicker in Andersen’s analysis is that the two drivers of the rise of these alternative realities have been movements that progressives would see as part of our legacy – the 1960s counterculture and the rise of the internet.

Andersen argues the 60s gave western thought the permission to break free of the shackles of objectivity, the drug-fuelled, free-love, postmodern assault on certainty allowing anyone and everyone to construct their own reality. We embraced the attack on conservative constructs without quite appreciating the implications of our intellectual triumph.

When the internet took the next step in breaking down the hierarchy of scarce information, we celebrated its capacity to challenge the existing gatekeepers. But we didn’t appreciate how it would become a home for every venal view and belief dressed up as fact, fuelled by search algorithms that order information by popularity rather than by the quality of the information.

To Andersen, this is a curiously American phenomenon: the sole remaining world power’s grip on global hegemony is compromised by myths and dreams of its own construction.

But the same waves have applied through Australian culture, albeit we have never been at the epicentre of these cultural moments. Over the past decade our political discourse has been shaped by conservatives like Tony Abbott and Cory Bernardi who have been heavily influenced by both the ideology and the tactics of the American conservative right.

Our major news outlets are owned and run by a former Australian who has been both a player and a shaper of the partisan echo chamber that has transformed the US media landscape to allow a figure like Trump to triumph, if not thrive.

“He used the new and remade pieces of the fantasy-industrial complex as nobody had before,” Andersen writes of Trump.

So how susceptible are we to the rise of a post-truth leader in Australia? Figures in this week’s Essential Report make for sobering reading.

While our participation in organised religion has been on the decline in recent decades, 40% of us still say we have a literal interpretation of the central tenants of heaven and hell. More than one third of us believe in angels and demons, ghosts with skin in the game, aliens who have visited the Earth and that Adam and Eve is more than a fable. While the number supporting popular conspiracy theories are lower, they still are at numbers that can influence the outcome of elections.

Breaking these numbers down, Coalition voters are more likely to embrace all the propositions than Labor and Green voters, suggesting here too that it is from the right where the post-truth market is strongest. And in what surprised me most about these results, it is among younger voters that support for these propositions is strongest.

Is this an indication of the real impact in a breakdown of the objective worldview, in the living consequences of the social media echo chamber or simply an assertion of the wisdom of age?

Anderson’s central warning is that when politics is built on shifting factual sands, then it is virtually impossible to erect anything of substance.

How can you manage the necessary transition of our energy base when the warnings of the science community can be so easily dismissed? How can we talk about providing everyone with a house, when the market is run by an industry that constructs its own commercial reality? How can we honour love when panic about gender reassignments sells so many more papers?

Objective reality has had a pretty tough run over the past 50 years, and who isn’t tempted to gild the lily in the heat of the political battle, when there’s no one to call you out, except the other side that no one trusts any more than they trust you?

As Andersen concludes, there is no easy way to reverse the decline, but a struggle to make politics reality-based again, where facts trump feelings and fantasy and challenging untruths is an act of political commitment, could be the necessary first step.