In the internet age nothing travels faster than a cliché whose time has come. No speech is now complete without a reference to our “post-truth” times — as if, until only yesterday, the pure water of truth flowed unceasingly from the lips of politicians and newscasters. Not to mention Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin and the totalitarian big lies dissected by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and George Orwell.

The new danger is better described by the more modest adjective “post-fact”. Indeed, “postfaktisch” has just been declared Germany’s word of the year. The essence of the post-fact threat to democracy is that entirely false claims (the Pope supports Donald Trump for president, Barack Obama was not born in the US), wrapped up in emotionally appealing narratives and constantly magnified in online echo chambers, seem to have acquired the power to sway a significant part of the electorate.

Warm narrative prevails over cold fact, feeling over reason. Even when Mr Obama had actually published his birth certificate, Mr Trump declared “a lot of people feel it wasn’t a proper certificate” (my italics). The comedian Stephen Colbert’s satirical concept of “truthiness” has been trumped by Mr Trump.