Facts, Values, and Democracy Worth Wanting: Strategic Public Deliberation in the Era of Trump

Abstract

In this paper, I characterize the troubling emergence of “post-truth” politics, represented by the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and similar developments in other national contexts, in terms of dual crises of epistemic and political legitimacy. I argue that the dichotomy between facts and values plays a key role in these crises, and that democratic deliberation represents a particularly promising opportunity to overcome this dichotomy and legitimate political discourse at a national scale. In order to make this case, I draw upon developments in the field of educational program evaluation and apply the insights gleaned to suggest possibilities for leveraging strategic public deliberation to ground and legitimate political discourse and discussion in the Trump era.