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Nick Silver
Nick Silver is an actuary and economist whose specialities include risk management, social insurance and environmental finance. He is the author of "Finance, Society and Sustainability: How to Make the Financial System Work for the Economy, People and Planet" (2017).
In his celebrated 1986 work, philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as "speech intended to persuade without regard for the truth." Unlike lying—where truth matters to the liar who seeks to deceive—bullshit treats truth as irrelevant. The bullshitter may speak truth or falsehood but doesn’t care which.
I don’t know whether Steve Bannon, MAGA's chief strategist, had this in mind when he articulated a strategy of "flood the zone with shit" at "muzzle velocity" to overwhelm media and democratic institutions, which he regarded as the real enemy. The speed and volume of BS is the crucial feature.
Whilst BS is clearly not a new phenomena, the current manifestation has emerged from the current media and information landscape. Following Marshal McLuhan’s framework that ‘the media is the message’1, BS seems to be an essential feature of the current media landscape.
The global rise of populist movements, turbo-charged by the presidency of Donald Trump, represents a fundamental shift in the importance of BS in politics. This rests on two propositions which I believe are testable:
An example of bullshit reality would be the (very real) attack on the Capitol on January 6 2021 – though in part this was inspired by an actual lie (that Trump one the election) many of the participants were devotees of the QAnon conspiracy and other conspiracy theories, encompassing a whole bullshit epistemology, which made them open to the lie in the first place.
Measuring Political Bullshit
Political bullshit could potentially be measured by analyzing the frequency of false statements in speeches and policy positions. Unlike lies or spin, which are limited to maintain credibility, bullshit involves systematic disregard for factual accuracy across multiple topics and timeframes.
This creates a measurable pattern: bullshitters will exhibit high frequency and variance of falsehoods, while traditional politicians—even when they lie or spin—will maintain higher baseline and variance of truthfulness to preserve credibility. Supporting media ecosystems amplify this effect by repeating rather than challenging falsehoods.
The second measurement involves tracking whether bullshit-aligned rhetoric becomes actual policy. By mapping correlations between false claims and subsequent government actions, it could be demonstrated how bullshit transcends mere campaign rhetoric to drive real-world decisions.
Two Types of Political Bullshit
Type A: Bullshit as Strategy - The actor has clear objectives and uses bullshit to advance them while concealing true intentions. Putin's "de-Nazification" justification for invading Ukraine exemplifies this: clear strategic goals masked by obvious BS designed to confuse international response and domestic opposition.
Type B: Bullshit as Policy Driver - Here, the bullshit itself generates policy rather than merely disguising it. Trump's "Gaza Riviera" proposal—initially seeming like random rhetoric—has aligned with actual Israeli-American discussions about Palestinian displacement. Similarly, his threats to annex Canada have driven real tariff policies aimed to impoverish Canada into submission.
Democratic Vulnerability
Democratic systems are vulnerable to bullshit politics because they depend on informed debate, transparent policymaking, and shared factual baselines. Bullshit undermines all three foundations.
Type A bullshit overwhelms information channels, making genuine policy scrutiny increasingly difficult. The volume fatally distracts media and opposition to spend resources fact-checking and debating the BS and thus magnifying it, rather than analysing actual policies and issues
Type B bullshit adds dangerous arbitrariness to governance. When policies emerge from random BS rather than strategic thinking, long-term planning becomes impossible for both domestic institutions and international partners. Which country will face arbitrary sanctions next? Which domestic program will be suddenly eliminated? The unpredictability itself becomes a governing strategy.
Political Epistemologies Under Attack
Perhaps most dangerously, sustained bullshit creates alternative political epistemologies—entire belief systems divorced from reality. QAnon represents the extreme end, but similar dynamics appear across the political spectrum when groups operate entirely within bullshit-generated worldviews.
This makes traditional democratic dialogue nearly impossible. When courts, media, and expertise-based institutions are viewed as enemies rather than neutral arbiters, the basic infrastructure of democratic disagreement collapses. Political opposition becomes existential warfare rather than policy competition.
Political Responses to the Bullshit Era
Traditional political responses—fact-checking, debate, institutional procedures – are inadequate against systematic bullshit. Fact-checking amplifies BS by generating more coverage. Debate becomes impossible when one side operates without regard for truth.
Political actors serious about preserving democratic governance need new strategies:
Information Triage: Rather than engaging with every false claim, political opposition must develop systematic approaches to identify which bullshit demands response and which should be ignored.
Distinguishing Types: Type A bullshit requires work to uncover underlying agendas which need to be resisted rather than the BS itself. Type B requires tracking of how random rhetoric becomes policy.
Coalition Building: Since bullshit transcends traditional party lines, new coalitions need to emerge – in spite of differing political positions - around shared commitment to factual governance rather than ideological agreement.
Long-term Focus: Bullshit politics deliberately creates crisis fatigue and short-term thinking. Effective opposition must maintain focus on long-term consequences and systematic patterns rather than responding to daily provocations.
Institutional Defense: Democratic institutions—courts, legislative procedures, electoral systems—require active protection rather than passive reliance. This means political actors must prioritize institutional integrity even when it conflicts with short-term tactical advantages.
The Stakes for Democratic Politics
Since I first started thinking about the impact of bullshit, I have been wondering if my argument itself is BS. Reflecting on the helpful feedback I have received, I have been convinced that BS is pernicious in the extreme and represents an existential threat. The threat is more general than to specific policies, but an undermining of shared frameworks that make democratic governance possible at all.
Both type A and B bullshit undermine the institutions that underpin pluralistic liberal democracies, both national and international – directly because reasoned debate based on facts is itself a critical institution, but also indirectly – type A is a strategy of deceit hiding an underlying motivation, and that motivation is necessarily pernicious, whereas type B undermines institution either by forcing them to implement BS rather than rational or worthwhile policy goals, or directly attacks institutions for BS reasons.
That is not to say that these institutions are not in need of radical reform or change, but this reform needs to be carried out in good faith: fact-based, transparent and with wide consensus. As a society, BS and the agents who deploy it, should be seen as national threats. Politicians and interest groups which share a common reality-based belief system need to put political and ideological differences aside to form a broad coalition to fight this common threat, as they might do in times of war or national emergency, until this threat is defeated.
1 McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. [1st ed.] McGraw-Hill.