How do the many crises reverberating across American politics intersect with a popular sense of living in a “post-truth” world? Much recent research has looked at political crises and misinformation in isolation. Ziblatt and Levitsky's Tyranny of the Minority, for example, describes the erosion of democratic norms, whereas Berinsky's Political Rumors investigates the scope of false claims and offers ways to rebut them. David Ricci's Post-Truth Politics: False Stories and Current Crises distinguishes itself by positing that such crises are inextricable from a post-truth moment. More specifically, he argues that the political and economic crises confronting American politics are better understood by appreciating the role of stories (or “Stories,” in his lexicon), and that these stories are especially dangerous in a country where truth does not appear to matter as much as it once did.

He focuses on two crises in particular: the economic crisis of inequality, attributable to neoliberalism, and the political crisis of polarization and minority rule. He believes these crises are the result of Stories, propagated by the left and right. Stories are widespread public narratives, similar to Hochschild's “deep stories” and Postman's “narratives.” To Ricci, stories “continu