Legitimancy — The ability to conjure an aura of legitimacy around dubious or questionable actions through the opportunistic use of marginal truths, unverifiable evidence, supposition, wilful ignorance, calls to patriotism and fear mongering. Its successful practice requires the public to willingly suspend disbelief, ignore common sense, and reconcile obvious contradictions.

Legitimancy is a synthesis of the word “legitimate,” something that is reasonable, acceptable, or valid, and the Greek suffix “-mancy,” the magical process of divination or interpretation. The term was coined to characterize the rhetoric used by American, British and Australian politicians to justify the war in Iraq.

Something that has legitimancy has acquired a veneer of plausibility through the skilful manipulation and interpretation of opinion rather than any basis in fact or evidence. Legitimancy relies on a “grey area” between truth, propaganda and outright deceit that permits its practitioners to blame subordinates for errors in judgement or to make qualifying statements that insulate them from responsibility (see the changing claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda).

Politicians employ legitimancy to hold off critics and opponents of a particular policy long enough for that policy to become a reality through forceful persistence (see the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing). As legitimancy is a tool of expedience, it cannot withstand sustained inquiry or critical examination.

When the truth is finally revealed — usually after a laborious process of public and/or internal investigations (see the Flood, Butler or U.S. Senate reports) — the practitioners of legitimancy usually fall back on a series of justifications:

  • “I’m still confident we will find the evidence” defence,
  • “What’s done is done. We should focus on the current reality” defence,
  • “The information was right at the time” defence,
  • “Maybe we were mistaken about that part, but we had many other valid reasons for doing what we did” defence, and
  • “We’ve made the world a better place regardless of why we did it” defence (a.k.a. the “end justifies the means” defence).

The only known measures to combat legitimancy are to place all politicians under oath before public speeches or hold them accountable at elections.

See also burden of proof (meeting the), duped, evidence (lack of), disinformation, dissemble, doublespeak, garble, misrepresent, obfuscate, plausible deniability, propaganda, stonewall, whitewash.