From This Is Not Propaganda (Peter Pomerantsev, 2019) pp208-11
‘All politics is now about creating identity’ – that was the argument a spin doctor made as we sat in a bar in Mexico City, the terrace so shaded by dense foliage it seemed like night down below, while the sky was curacao-blue above. He explained to me that the old notions of class and ideology were dead. When he ran a campaign now, he had to take disparate, discrete interests and unite them under a new notion of ‘the people’.
The spin doctor wore a pinstripe shirt, his hair was slicked back he looked quite the yuppie. ‘Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy: he asserted, invoking two theoreticians from the University of Essex, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who first coined the notion of ‘populism as strategy’, though they had meant it to advance a new sort of socialism. I was surprised at his choice of favourite theorists he didn’t look like much of a socialist himself. He told me his personal preference was for the left, but he would work with anyone who paid the rent.
The nature of social media encourages populism as a strategy. Take a look at things from the point of view of the spin doctor. People on social media are organised across vastly different interests: animal rights and hospitals, guns and gardening, immigration and parenting and modern art. Some of these might be overtly political, while others are private. Your aim is reach out to these different groups in completely different ways, tying the voting behaviour you want to what they care about the most.
This sort of micro-targeting, where one set of voters shouldn’t necessarily know about the others, requires some big, empty identity to unite all these different groups, something so broad these voters can project themselves onto it a category like ‘the people’ or ‘the many’. The ‘populism’ that is thus created is not a sign of ‘the people’ coming together in a great groundswell of unity, but a consequence of ‘the people’ being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation. When people have less in common than before, you have to reimagine a new version of ‘the people’.
Facts become secondary in this logic. After all, you are not trying to win an evidence-driven debate about ideological concepts in a public sphere; your aim is to seal in your audience behind a verbal wall. It’s the opposite of ‘centrism’, where you have to bring everyone together in one big tent, smooth out differences. Here the different groups don’t even need to meet each other. Actually, it might be better if they don’t: what if one perceives the other as their enemy?
To seal this improvised identity one needs an enemy: ‘the non-people’. Best to keep it too as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of what it means: ‘the Establishment’ will do, or ‘elites’, ‘the swamp’. The spin doctor in Mexico admitted that, sadly, this could get nasty. Consider the US. The Trump presidential campaign targeted freemarketeers, American preservationists, ‘anti-elites’, the working class and that doesn’t even touch on the multitude of micro-groups targeted on social media. Some social media ads didn’t even mention Donald Trump himself, avoiding showing the reality-show star and focusing instead on touchy-feely messages that were quite out of synch with his vitriol. But, unlike their rivals in the Clinton camp, the campaign team then managed to unite all these different groups in a general anger at ‘the swamp’ and foreigners.
Or one could look at Italy, where the Five Star Movement started as a series of Facebook blogs representing completely different grievances for different audiences, from ecology to immigration, potholes in roads to foreign policy. The fault for all of these was laid at the door of ‘the Establishment’ and channelled through the manic energy of their anarchic, curly-haired, sweary leader, the comedian-turned-politico Beppe Grillo.
And then there’s England. I used to think the English were different: that if anyone in the world knew who they were, it was them, a people defined so precisely by class, accent, schools, postcodes, counties, parties and sports teams it could be hard to know, for an immigrant like myself, how to fit in. But something has shifted. An air of uncertainty underlies everything.
I’d first noticed something was changing in Britain while talking to one of the architects of the Brexit campaign soon after his referendum victory, in a pub in London. He started a sentence by saying, ‘The problem for people like you is . . .’ I can’t remember the rest (it may have been something like ‘metropolitan liberals are so out of touch’) because his opening words made me feel so unexpectedly at home. I’d always been the ‘Russian’ foreigner. Now, finally, I was no longer being asked to play the part of the outsider; I was in. This made me feel warm. That happiness, however, was quickly followed by dismay. The only reason I was being included was to play the puppet ‘globalist’, the enemy. ‘People like you’ was only being invoked as a contrast to the ‘real people’. In the following months I heard other variants of this theme. ‘It must be hard for people like you,’ a Brexit activist consoled me. ‘Can’t you tell Brexit happened because of people like you?’ a philosopher scolded me. It was confusing. What ‘people’ did they mean? I had always considered myself at most a lucky guest in England, and had been treated courteously as such, yet now I had woken up to find myself an enemy.
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