In this episode, I explore a question that has followed Richard Rorty for years and feels especially urgent now: did his pragmatism, and his rejection of universal foundations for truth, help create the post-truth culture we are living in? Drawing from Eduardo Mendieta’s article “Rorty and Post-Post-Truth” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I argue that this is ultimately a caricature of Rorty. What Rorty challenged was not facts, evidence, or public accountability, but the fantasy that truth requires a metaphysical guarantee outside human history, language, and democratic life. Rather than leading to cynicism or political manipulation, his work points us back to the communal labor of justification and to the fragile social conditions that make truthfulness possible at all.

I also make the case that what has far more plausibly given rise to our post-truth moment is the erosion of social trust, the collapse of social capital, and the polarizing effects of algorithmic media environments that reward outrage, identity, and reaction over shared inquiry. So this becomes not just an episode about Rorty, but about what democratic culture needs in order for truth to have public life at all.