‘‘YOU BELIEVE THAT REALITY is something objective, external, existing in its own right … But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.” Thus O’Brien, the torturer of 1984, describes George Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare: where the physical world is an illusion and truth an empty word.
Champions of the Western liberal tradition have long asserted that reality is knowable: without hard facts to hold on to, the individual is powerless against the whim of tyrants or the madness of crowds. Critics of liberalism, on the other hand, have tended to ridicule the belief in objective truth as naive.
During the Trump presidency, liberals and centrists expressed alarm at a “post-truth” era. Others saw the chief threat to fact-based liberalism coming not from government but from the suppression of debate in the name of
