Postmodern politics runs on spin rather than totalized official lies.

Evidence

The lies of Vietnam produced and culminated in the lies of Watergate. The drama of uncovering and punishing the Watergate lies is a good candidate for marker not just of the end of the long ”decade” of the sixties but also of modernity itself. After Watergate, in postmodernity, we expect and take for granted not the Big Lie, or any massive, totalized hidden truth it covers, but rather ambiguous evasions, partial truths, inevitable ”spin” and selective manipulation of fact; multiple, conflicting, variously interested, situated, and relative versions of reality, all part of the language games of politics. When there is no longer any unitary, transparent truth, there can be no Big Lie. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 715

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme of how Watergate marked the end of the sixties’ modernity-based worldview, and to Williams’s structure-of-feeling framework from ch3. — connects to: The socialist meaning of participatory democracy faded while the politics-of-the-self meaning triumphed. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 433; Postmodern constitutional thought marks a shift from truth to meaning. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 874
• APHORISMS: A genuine insight about the nature of political truth-telling worth returning to: when no unitary truth is believed to exist, no grand official lie is even needed.

Broader Connections

• Postmodern constitutional thought marks a shift from truth to meaning. #expands (0.80) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 874