Introduction

When we started working on this volume, the Brexit referendum had just taken place and President Obama was finishing the final months of his presidency. By the time the first chapters came in, Brexit negotiations had started to sour as campaign promises met economic reality, and the United States had a new president with a unique relationship with the truth. Of course, these are not necessarily new phenomena. The ideas that politicians lie, or at least bend the truth, to fit their political goals and that political campaigns make promises untethered from reality are not unique to this political age. However, the distance between reality and rhetoric might be.