crisis demonstrates are truly deep-seated and persistent difficulties in dealing “factually” with our current situation. It isn’t just those denounced as populists who have a problem with truth. It goes far wider and far deeper and it affects the center as much as the margins of mainstream politics. We do not need to go back to the notoriously misleading and incoherent case made for the war against Iraq and its fawning media coverage. It was the current president of the European Commission who announced in the spring of 2011: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”52 At least, one might
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