William Davies's The Age Of Post-Truth Politics

William Davies, author of "The Age of Post-Truth Politics", writes in the public discourse on account of the current sociopolitical ambiance for the general populace. The intention of this piece is to discuss the trend once again breaking out of spinning the truth to create advantages on behalf of the proponent or disadvantage for the opponent. It is a professional piece critiquing, specifically, political parties for their twisting of the truth instead of relying on data to convince the populace of their ability. Davies uses an impassioned, urgent tone to evoke a feeling - a need to undertake immediate action - by asking rhetorical questions such as " How can we speak of 'facts' when they no longer provide us with a reality that we all agree on?" and "…how are we to achieve any consensus on the nature of social, economic and environmental problems, never mind agree on the solutions?", as well as providing questions in the form of statements. He does this in order to lead readers to discover their own feelings on the morality of twisting the truth to benefit your own ends. Davis points out, "…to focus on recent, more egregious abuses of fact is to overlook the ways in which the authourity of facts has been in decline for quite some time.", and uses statements like this to appeal to the readers' pathos. He points out that the twisting of facts, …show more content…
The author pays almost no attention to the "they say" aspects of the discourse, other than to state them in an offhand manner. There is no concession, therefore there is no true refutation of opposing arguments that could be posed to his