The other face will have controversial lightning-rod front-men or women such as Farage or Keen, but is powered mostly by anonymous social media accounts, whose bios usually carry a plethora of hashtags and insignia announcing their allegiance to campaigns or issues. This side can be swiftly mobilised to fill in petitions, show up to protests, and dogpile opponents. Being anonymous, they’re also largely exempt in practice if not in theory from the formal rules of liberal civil discourse. As such they serve as crucial shock troops in any single-issue campaign.
But this Janus-faced campaigning model, first seen during the EU referendum, isn’t just for dissidents. Rather, its success during Brexit set a new political template that has since been widely adopted. Recently characterised by political economist Thomas Prosser as “low liberalism”, this social media-driven form of political discourse pursues liberal aims via sometimes starkly illiberal means, for example the emerging “liberal defence of no-platforming”, or the wholesale delegitimisation of opponents as evil or bad actors.
Prosser sees low liberalism as emerging in the aftermath of the Trump/Brexit revolt, as a popular defence of the status quo against Right-populism. Its first UK manifestation was probably the #FBPE movement that sprang up, first on social media but subsequently in new publications and sometimes very large street demonstrations, to give mass voice to those who rejected Brexit and sought to reverse the referendum; it has since mutated to encompass multiple issues.
The mob that gathered to dogpile Kellie-Jay Keen in New Zealand over the weekend is a textbook example of low liberalism. And such low-liberal mobs serve exactly the same purpose as any other swarm of hashtag ideologues. That is, they serve as authoritarian shock troops for others who benefit politically from their actions but prefer not to be tainted with their methods. The antipodean politicians and journalists who first demonised Kellie-Jay Keen as undesirable, then refused to condemn the mob who left her in fear for her life, can serenely deny any complicity with the violence unleashed upon her. But I dare say a great many of them privately think what low liberals say out loud: Keen deserved everything she got.
And it’s no use wringing our hands and lamenting the loss of civility in politics. We stopped forming liberal democratic citizens a generation ago, as we began to transition from a print-first to a digital-first culture.
And in this new age, the older norms of neutrality, debate, long-form writing, evidence and so on are meaningful and effective only among a shrinking minority. For this group, the principal vector for political influence isn’t the electoral process, but some distance upstream of it. For the rest, whether it’s in service to the onward march of Progress or arrayed against it, demagoguery is the order of the day. Hashtags, video clips, insinuations — and, increasingly, violent mobs.
This post-democratic form of politics now operates by coordinating formal and informal campaign styles, all with the right measure of deniability. You can’t move the political needle if you only have internet crazies — because (as the Capitol rioters discovered in America) you can riot all you like but if you’re not backed up by any institutional power, you’re toast. Equally, without a convincingly large mob of online crazies who can be mobilised to defend your programme, you’re vulnerable to accusations of being one of the “sinister elites” of conspiracy mythology.
Of course, this game is heavily rigged in favour of one team. Covid debates saw the creeping politicisation of everything propagated, with ever greater shamelessness, under the banner of liberal neutrality. And under this order the Good Internet Crazies, the “low liberals”, are routinely given a pass for levels of illiberalism and overall derangement that would have their enemies permanently tarred as beyond the pale.
But the larger point is that in a digital-first culture, there’s no stuffing the post-democratic genie back in the bottle. There’s nothing to be gained from lamenting the end of civility, or reasoned discourse, much-missed though these are. And there’s no point complaining about egregious asymmetries in how bad behaviour is punished, between the Good Crazies (who are just passionate) and the Bad Crazies (who are evil). The only way forward is to stop singing threnodies for a vanished political order, and start thinking strategically about how to survive in the one that replaced it.
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