By Laura Andrea De Alba Huerta and Quentin Machado
ON THE EVE OF THE 2016 US ELECTION, the republican candidate Donald Trump made his first international headline with his campaign promise to build a wall throughout the border with Mexico. During the last French election in 2022, the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour presented a similar background. This anti-immigration editorialist, a fervent defender of the Great Replacement theory by the Muslims – which foretells of a sociocultural replacement of the ‘French people’ by the Islamic culture – made himself a comfortable place in the public debate, playing on people’s passion to gain a reasonable 8% of the votes with a party he created only a few months before the elections. Those are just two among many other extremist arguments which are increasingly common in contemporary political discourse.
Never in history has the political debate been so polarised. So it is pertinent to reflect on what role new ways of social interaction like social media and a transformed traditional mass media play. A traditional media that now privileges live reactions to trending topics, leaving aside fact-checking and objective analyses. How have we fallen into the rhetorical trap of furious debates without any moderate, rational discussion?
Perhaps the arguments used by Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen in France, and other far-right politicians accused of being populist have little novelty. Divisionist theories have always been a part of political discourses. However, something that has indeed changed is the channels that radical politicians have at their disposal to spread nationalist propaganda. These are channels that are daily monitored by 60% of the global population searching for entertainment, and that have increasingly made a space for political ideas in a particular 90-second video format. Social media has created a whole new arena for how political discourse is created and shaped in a never-ending iterative process.
“Never in history has the political debate been so polarised. How have we fallen into the rhetorical trap of furious debates without any moderate, rational discussion?”
Furthermore, all these leaders gained office democratically, and seem to circle around the same topics: immigration, nationalism, protectionism, and once in office they don’t seem to have the interests of those who voted for them at heart, pushing for policies that directly and negatively affect their supporters.
Throughout their campaign these politicians direct the public attention to almost exclusively subjects of immigration, nationalism, and protectionism, making the voters and their opponents focus solely on rebutting racist, separatist or misogynist arguments. Elections are won based on an irrational choice that best adapts to one’s worldview on those narrow subjects, and not on a comprehensive analysis of the policies which directly impact citizens’ lives. This explains why low-income and predominantly white neighbourhoods in the United States voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 elections even though his neoliberal economic agenda would directly negatively affect their lives, by, for instance, reducing their access to healthcare and education.
Using the magic wand of populism allows for a fostering of people’s grievances on these hot button issues and appears nowadays to be a sufficient programme to run for office, without bothering to outline further realistic policies on how to solve the roots of these grievances. What happens with a society that allows them to maintain relatively steady popular support despite this fact? Which campaign and electoral strategies are these leaders using? How are they constructing their discourse? What are the tools they are employing? And what role does social media play in all of it?
The Complicated Balance Between Reason and Passion
A possible answer to these questions may be found in what the Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe advocates for in her article “Democratic Politics and Conflict: An Agonistic Approach” (2016). Mouffe disagrees with theories placing reason at the centre of electoral attitudes. Voters are not necessarily rational but instead tend to lean towards the candidate who projects the version of the world that best adapts to their own, Mouffe posits.
Instead, Mouffe advocates for a model where there is room for ‘passion’ while still seeking collective forms of identification and democratic objectives. According to her, the lack of an institutionalised outlet for ‘the people’s’ passions would only continue to advance the popularity of far right wing parties. Eight years later, the world’s electoral tendencies appear to prove her prediction right.
Would it be safe to say that social media is an outlet that institutions failed to provide? How does political discourse transform and adapt itself to find room in platforms where users go to evade the pressure of their day-to-day hassles?
The Digital Evolution of the Entertainment State
With the rise of mass and social media, politics have tilted into a nationwide show business. In his essay L’État-Spectacle (the ‘Entertainment State’, 1977), the French politician Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg blamed the personalisation of the power by ‘star-politicians’: fostered by the mainstream media, it implies that public representatives let their passions and private lives freely be to gain more attention from their ‘audience’-electorate. The political philosopher Bernard Manin would later theorise the ‘Democracy of Public’ (1995), marking the shift from a rational, party-based competition towards elections merely managed by spin doctors, the television turning into a wild arena where strong political characters are fighting each other with pathos-based speeches – the apex of it being the presidential election debate.
Not only were Schwartzenberg and Manin forerunners alerted to the dangers of this shift away from a rational, peaceful democratic debate on radio and TV, but their work is more than ever valid in nowadays’ context with the rise of social media. The electorate seems to have been reduced to mere spectators who tend to be less and less involved in the democratic debate.
“Undoubtedly, the democratised access to social media platforms with short video-based content presented itself as the hen of the golden eggs to all of these emergent entertainment politicians.”
Undoubtedly, the democratised access to social media platforms with short video-based content presented itself as the hen of the golden eggs to all of these emergent entertainment politicians. With this overlap of politics and entertainment in one’s pocket candidates could now create personal accounts with total creative freedom, away from restrictions proper to televised debates, free from rebuttal arguments and with a total screentime monopoly.
Consequently, in less than two decades social media went from being an only-entertainment-based platform to the place where public political discourse is not only transmitted but created. All candidates, without exception, have a presence on TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook. The messages are shaped following whichever format is trending at the moment. Never before has it been easier to communicate one’s version of reality in 90 seconds or less. And better yet, with next to no accountability.
The Black Box of the Algorithm
The entertainment state has at its disposal a powerful tool: the algorithm. This machine was created to provide the user with almost exclusively positive experiences according to their preferences. The digitalised entertainment state uses the algorithm to reassure the user of their political preferences and build them a discursive bubble of comfortable self-convictions. For training it, direct engagement is not required anymore, it observes and gathers data from the smallest interactions: number of reproductions, time spent on the caption, on the comment section, or comment disliked, scrolled through quickly. No one knows better what you like, and most importantly, what you dislike.
As a result, we are becoming less exposed to worldviews that may challenge our own. This is particularly evident in political debates, where the healthy social conflict that Mouffe advocates for has ceased to exist. In the past, we were compelled to watch presidential debates where both candidates received roughly equal time, even if true dialogue was lacking. Now, we only see edited clips that candidates choose to upload to their Instagram accounts, frequently taken out of context. If you disagree with the opposition’s message, you can simply block, flag, or dislike it. Individuals can curate their exposure to only what aligns with their preferences. This narrows the range of discourse we surround ourselves with, creating a fragmented and incomplete version of reality. Consequently, users find themselves in a self-reinforcing environment, where ‘reality’ is exactly as one wants it to be.
The scariest part is perhaps the lack of transparency related to how this powerful set of information is used and collected. The algorithm is a black box owned by private companies who can and have sold it to the highest bidder. It is capitalism’s ultimate resource for intervening in democracy.
Into an Age of Digital Trench Warfare?
Privileging public reaction instead of reflection playes into the hands of various vested interests. For the ‘Big Tech’, conflictual posts are brought forward onto the user’s feed for the reaction they provoke: more (dis)likes and prolific comments generate more activity, thus increasing revenue. For the politicians, instrumentalizing the news can serve their discursive interest; for the shareholders of the media company, information selectivity allows, depending on their goodwill, to emphasise or omit some news.
“Behind a wall of self-made certainties, each one is entrenched in their opinion.”
Is it safe to say that the contemporary society has fallen into a trench warfare? Behind a wall of self-made certainties, each one is entrenched in their opinion. In this perspective, how mediatic issues are framed is not an innocent process: we assist in more and more securitization and oversimplification of the informational reality. Candidates and media prioritise the (political) issues that are able to weaponise the fears and insecurities in the heart of the audience. When the attention is captured, the debate turns into opinion warfare.
Arguably, a discursive binarity can divert the focal point of the conversation away from some problematic element of the debate: the citizen’s rationality and moderation would be the worst enemy for politics of entertainment. However, that’s how democracy works – and we are stepping away from it.
By: Laura Andrea De Alba Huerta and Quentin Machado
Photography: Jonathan Borba
