Lies, Bullshit, or Propaganda?

The notion of ‘Post-truth Politics’ and of the ‘Post-Factual’ are notoriously blurry. In this article, I distinguish the concepts of lies, bullshit, and propaganda. I argue that the post-factual displays elements of all three concepts, so that it can be either understood to be in continuity with using lies and bullshit as means of political discourse; or to discontinue the basic commitments of democracy by attacking the epistemic foundations. In a second step, I argue that the common orientation towards the ideal of public reason cannot be abandoned at will, so that any Post-truth Politics is bound to fail in the end. I defend a concept of deliberative democracy which has a robust understanding of the rationality of democratic deliberation. At the same time, I argue against the assumption that the solution to ‘post-factualism’ is a return to a fictitious ‘Age of Facts’ since there are not facts without interpretation.