To be truthful

Michael Patrick Lynch, On Truth in Politics: Why democracy demands it, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ / London, 2025, pp xii and 252.

Reviewed by Mike Makin-Waite

It’s a telling feature of our times that there are a growing number of books and articles concerned with issues of truth, ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories. Michael Patrick Lynch’s useful addition to the literature considers current problems of political regress and the shallowing of democracy which result in part from the coarsening of public discourse through the all-too common promotion of lies and bullshit.

Lynch acknowledges that the themes he is discussing are not entirely new, for example quoting Hannah Arendt’s 1967 observation ‘that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other’.

But he identifies how, particularly over the last two decades, ‘democracies around the globe have been experiencing … a growing scepticism about the value of democracy’, exemplified by the ‘growing popularity of authoritarian leaders and movements’ and declining levels of trust in democratic institutions and processes.

Lynch shows how these dangerous trends are linked to ‘a loss of confidence in the value of truth’. The very way that we understand politics has shifted from being about considering the range of options for addressing a series of recognised social issues to being instead ‘a matter of self-identity and passionate partisanship. We are used to living in our bubbles of hyperpartisan information, protected from the distasteful opinions of those different to us. And we’ve become numb to the seemingly endless stream of conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods sloshing around the internet’.

Lynch’s positive argument is that ‘truth and democracy are intertwined values’. He says that commitment to democratic politics means aspiring to ‘a way of conducting our political life together that emphasises inclusive, reflective deliberation’. This ‘requires collective investment in the means by which we can pursue truth – the infrastructure of knowledge’. It’s therefore crucial to defend and promote ‘epistemic infrastructure … the institutions and practices that undergird the responsible search for truth’.

From the beginning of his book, Lynch provides his readers with useful distinctions, such as between non-normative statements (an example would be ‘COVID infections are increasing…’) and normative judgements or propositions (‘… and we should therefore impose mask mandates’). The boundary line between these different kinds of statement is itself often politically disputed, and this helps explain how ‘conceptions of truth can become … entangled with different political meanings’. For Lynch, this is a risk to manage, even whilst at the same time we should acknowledge ‘the plurality of political judgements’. Nevertheless, insists Lynch, material facts and peoples’ varied political judgements are different things, and maintaining this distinction is a crucial task that requires ‘the constant scrutiny of responsible epistemic communities’.

This scrutiny is needed more than ever in a context where being a political leader – and supporter – has increasingly become ‘expressive’ and ‘performative’, with social media helping to drive this trend. Lynch helpfully pinpoints some of the ways in which this happens. Memes, for example, have proved ‘effective vehicles for misinformation and disinformation’ because they ‘foster a kind of creativity [so] that participating in the memesphere allows participants to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves’. Further, memes are ‘shared and reshared without attribution, which gives the impression that they are … “just there” … no-one has to answer for transgressive or hateful ideas’ which can, in any case, often be represented as ‘“just joking”’.

Extending his discussion of ‘performative’ politics, Lynch considers the motivations and psychological positions of those who promoted inconsistent right-wing conspiracies about the disorderly and violent events at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and those who have promoted outraged panic about the caricatured misrepresentation of Critical Race Theory which they allege is being promoted in schools and colleges in ways which harm white young people. In spite of the energy which such movements have displayed, and the influence they currently enjoy, Lynch insists that all is not lost: we can still do much to create and protect ‘collective practices and institutions that correct for our crooked timber, that makes us more responsive to our democratic and epistemic aims despite the fact that, considered as individuals, we are shoddy reasoners shot through with bias’.

The substantial chapters which make up part two of this book illustrate how Lynch believes that philosophical consideration can help us make sense of the challenges facing sense-making today. His concern is to identify the intellectual resources that can provide the basis for the work that’s needed, and states early on that ‘good, old fashioned American pragmatism’ as represented by John Dewey (pictured, 1859 – 1952) ‘offers us the best hope for a philosophical rehabilitation of political truth’.

On this basis, Lynch considers aspects of the work of Richard Rorty and Jurgen Habermas, amongst others, guides us through a range of logical constructions, and argues that political truth involves ‘concordance’, as when ‘political propositions … are durably coherent not only with each other but with what else is true. True political propositions supercohere with a framework of supercoherent reasons, some of which are true because they correspond to reality outside the framework, others of which are true by being part of the framework’.

‘What else is true’, of course, begs a whole set of other questions. By the time we move on from such (relatively) incontestable statements such as that I am sat at a desk tip-tapping this review onto a laptop computer, and we get into the arena of politically disputed issues, it’s clear that ‘truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed, ready-made’ (to quote Hegel, one of the important thinkers who Lynch does not engage with here).

Necessarily complex as some of his arguments are, Lynch’s style is clear, sometimes even conversational, and he illustrates his points with helpful thought-experiments, such as the imaginary (?) ‘Twitbookians’, a community of people ‘who only make political claims that are liked (or at least not disliked) by [their] allies and potentially hated by [their] enemies’: ‘conformity’ rather than ‘concordance’ is their guide as to whether to ‘believe’ a political argument.

The closing chapter of On Truth in Politics is particularly accessible – and urgent: ‘in the United States, Brazil, and many other countries, citizens are at risk of becoming numb not only to outrageous falsehoods, but to the bizarre self-assurance with which they are often pronounced’.

Lynch urges us to ‘protect and promote our epistemic institutions and their rules’, and to defend and develop the ‘epistemic infrastructure’, including ‘the rules that govern truth-seeking in journalism, education, science and law’, such as ‘that journalists should use more than one source, that teachers should use accurate textbooks …’.

That such points need to be argued underlines the challenges that we face in these great and glorious times. Lynch concludes: ‘the struggle against the forces of epistemic corruption is the struggle for collective epistemic responsibility. It is the struggle for democracy’.

Published: 7 October 2025.

Click through for further reviews on relevant themes: considerations on defending truth; making sense of fake news; understanding the attractions of conspiracy theories; and the degradation of public discourse.