Brexit and Trump’s victory hit the liberal media like a thunderbolt of stupidity. How could voters defy the warnings of so many pundits, wonks, and fact-checkers? Almost unanimously, they answered: We live in an age characterized by post-factual politics. Pushed by major media organizations like Forbes and the New York Times, “post-truth” recently became Oxford Dictionaries’ new word of the year. A recent think piece in Huffington Post labeled “Post-Truth Nation” stated this idea succinctly: “the greatest problem of our future is not political; it is not economic; it is not even rational. It’s the battle of fact versus fiction.”

Liberal writers deploy their own different varieties of post-truth — the social media echo chamber, the prevalence of fake news, the public’s indifference to blatant political lies, or the problem with millennials — to explain what happened in the United Kingdom and the United States this year. They all agree, however, that voters and politicians increasingly deny facts, manipulate the truth, and prefer emotion to expertise.

They also don’t seem to know how we entered this post-fact world or when the factual age, which must have preceded it, ended. Was it in the 2000s, when the whole world debated imaginary weapons of mass destruction before being conned into war? Or was it in the 1990s, when the Lewinsky scandal dominated newspapers, and the United States panicked over superpredators and crack babies? Perhaps it was really Reagan’s 1980s, with its secret, Central American wars, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the denial of the AIDS epidemic. Or maybe we need to go back even further: to Nixon’s not-a-crook 1970s, to George Wallace’s law-and-order 1960s, or to McCarthy’s redbaiting 1950s.