In his classic liberal text, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argues that expansive individual freedom is valuable to society—and not just to individuals—because its exercise leads society closer to truth. Even if individuals loudly, offensively, and annoyingly proclaim falsehoods, their speech remains valuable because, on Mill’s account, it prompts the rest of us to understand more clearly why and how our principles, values, or scientific explanations are correct. Conversely, the ultimate indeterminacy of truth—the fact that we will never settle on what the absolute truth is— is part of Mill’s justification for his robust defense of individual freedom. If we cannot say for sure what the absolute best life is, or what the absolute best explanation of the cosmos is, then we must defend a broad scope of individual freedom so that possibly true, yet unpopular, ways of thinking and living—which may be despised or decried by an individual’s society—have a fecund ground in which to grow. A defense of liberal freedom, in other words, depends on defending truth as a crucial social value while also insisting on the importance of all kinds of skepticism about, and even rejections of the importance of, truth.

If a defense of truth and skepticism about truth have long characterized the liberal tradition, so too has an attempt to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate forms of skepticism about truth. Mill says we may shame or ostracize individuals who are mean or egotistical in their speech. And although he defends a broad scope of western forms of life and speech, he claims that “barbarian” nations are too immature to practice free, skeptical speech, and that other nations (especially China) are too bogged down by tradition to be capable of free thinking.

In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum negotiate a similar problem in their indictment of what they call the “new conspiracism.” They argue that the “new conspiracism” is dangerous to democracy because it’s the wrong kind of skepticism about truth: “Its fabulations sever the connection between assertions and beliefs on the one hand and anything verifiable in the world on the other. This immunizes conspiracist claims from scrutiny and doubt. What follows is that the new conspiracists undercut not only knowledge but also skepticism” (p. 116). The new conspiracism pretends to be a form of democratic skepticism, but it is actually, on their account, a kind of tribalism, in which people affirm their identity through affirming conspiracist claims. Individuals come to desire tribalism rather than democracy, out of a disgust with two foundations of democratic legitimacy: political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. For Muirhead and Rosenblum, the consequences of the new conspiracism are dire: its irrational character—its disconnection from reality—disorients the public and delegitimates the partisan politics and knowledge-producing institutions on which democracy depends. The best response to this, on the authors’ account, is to speak truth to conspiracy and to “enact democracy,” by which they mean elected officials pedagogically performing adherence to existing institutional procedures and democratic norms (pp. 158–59). Here, the role of citizens in relegitimating democracy is more limited: watching and absorbing the behavior of those truly on the political stage—elected officials. For relegitimation to “take hold, citizens need to witness exhibitions of institutional integrity” (my emphasis; p. 159).

Muirhead and Rosenblum are correct that the new conspiracists are not practicing a form of skepticism that relies on reasons or proceeds via justification. Yet, should we be so quick to dismiss all claims to truth-telling in which there is no connection between the assertion and “anything verifiable in the world”? Other forms of democratic contestation that we might be quicker to avow and affirm also lack this connection. For example, when protestors proclaim that “Black Lives Matter” in response to police violence, are they pointing to something “verifiable” in the world? After all, their proclamation responds to the fact that Black lives are not mattering. This is why, as Hannah Arendt argues, the liar and the political actor have something important in common: they both imagine the world otherwise. Indeed, BLM protesters are making a different kind of political claim, a claim of how the world should be or how they claim it must be, and their claim (in Bonnie Honig’s terms) demands vindication through political action and transformation, not verification through reason-giving or justificatory arguments.

Of course, part of the reason why BLM protesters speak in this register of democratic claims-making—putting their bodies on the line on behalf of a world that does not yet exist—is because the “normal” society in which they live, which Muirhead and Rosenblum appear to want us to return to, is racist, unequal, and unjust. In the terms of “normal” American society, their claim that Black Lives Matter is provocative, jarring, and out of tune with the color-blind ethos that structures how many US citizens view reality. Indeed, to some part of American society, the speech of BLM protesters surely looks like the wrong, irrational form of truth-telling that Muirhead and Rosenblum frame as new conspiracist—with no verifiable connection to anything in the world.

My point is not to challenge Muirhead and Rosenblum’s account on behalf of a more precise account of what kind of skepticism is democratically valuable, but instead to point to the problems with the attempt to adjudicate the problem of truth and politics abstractly and procedurally—through defining criteria by which we can adjudicate in advance (im)proper democratic truth-telling. Even though Muirhead and Rosenblum would surely distance themselves from Mill’s imperial hierarchies of thought and speech, their account of truth-telling as a practice of elected officials adhering to existing norms is inhabited by a Millian problem: attempts to justify supposedly neutral attributes of truth/truth-telling in a racist society inevitably obscure racial, gender, and class hierarchies that code who counts as a truth-teller and what counts as truth.

Muirhead and Rosenblum’s account thus unfortunately narrows our understanding of democratic truth-telling in a time that calls us to a more expansive imaginary of truth-telling as a practice of marginalized people telling the truth of their experience and changing the world so they and their truths can count as real and meaningful.

This narrowed conception of truth-telling does not simply affect how we see truth-tellers; it also shapes how we see the role of truth-telling in politics. For Muirhead and Rosenblum, truth-telling by elected officials via “enacting” democracy is important because it returns us to existing institutional norms. This view fails to capture the stakes and demands of our current political moment, in which truth-telling about police violence, for example, is aimed precisely at unsettling and transforming norms of racist institutions, and where truth-telling about climate change is not primarily about defending the authority of existing “knowledge-producing institutions,” but about demanding new institutions that would enact a Green New Deal. When we narrow our concept of truth-telling to elected officials adhering to existing norms, we miss the kinds of democratic truth-telling that are most crucial right now: those that aim not at shoring up the old norms of a racist, unjust society, but rather at changing the world.