Influencer politics and the crisis in Reform

A new kind of technologically-enhanced activist will seal the fate of Nigel Farage, and perhaps the UK

The UK, like the rest of Europe, is caught in a political pincer movement that originates in Washington.

On the one hand, as the United States’ military commitment to Europe weakens, the Russian threat looms larger and we are obliged to react. Britain has offered to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine and there is talk now of deploying the RAF as well. Keir Starmer has promised to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 – a promise enabled by cuts to overseas aid that prompted the resignation of a Cabinet minister. Probably there are bigger increases in defence spending to come, bigger cuts in other spending and more resignations.

On the other hand, the ideological and heavily online movement that propelled Donald Trump to power in the US is increasingly strong over here. Two weeks ago, the leaders of both the Conservative and Reform parties spoke to thousands at a cavernous conference organised by Paul Marshall, the owner of GB News, which featured Jordan Peterson and many other favourites of the American alt-right.

To see the pincer at work, just tune in to GB News. There you’ll find panellists who were probably at Marshall’s conference blaming the cost of defending Ukraine for people in Britain feeling left behind.

These two pincers are the two threats that I identified in Between Russia and America, one external and one internal, one composed of tanks and warships, one composed of ideology and social media algorithms, one channelled in speeches in Munich a month ago by Trump’s defence secretary, one by his vice-president.

Because the Conservatives have matched Starmer’s commitment on defence spending, the primary beneficiary of the pincer movement is set to be Reform, the party that is strong on MAGA and weak on Putin. So a starting point for understanding the pressure that the UK is under is to consider Reform’s electoral prospects. There is a traditional way of looking at this that is important but at the same time limited. It goes something like this.

For the first time since the 1920s, we have entered a period in England of four party politics involving Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Reform. Unlike two party politics, this makes the outcome of a general election highly sensitive to small shifts in the share of the vote each party wins.

Even so, to win, Reform would need to make an unprecedented leap at the next election. In the last election it won five seats. It came second in 98 constituencies, of which 89 were won by Labour. 60 of these were in the north of England and 13 were in Wales. Starting with this map, some demographics and attitudinal polling one can then start to identify an electoral coalition and associated policies that might propel Reform to power. This is retail politics and the core of the modern party. It was Labour’s success in this kind of exercise that gave it a majority of 158 seats on 34 per cent of the vote last time.

Then you can stand back a bit and note that it is hard to see a second party of the right winning a general election while the Conservatives continue to pick up 20+ per cent of the vote and 100+ MPs. So, even though Labour may be the immediate electoral target, long-term Reform is in a tussle to claim from the Conservatives the mantle of the leader of the right in the UK. And because everyone can see this, the tussle is already intense. The presence of both parties at Marshall’s conference is an example of this. And an important part of the tussle is played out in the quest for the support of the owners of right-wing media – Marshall (GB News, Spectator); Rupert Murdoch (Times, Sun); Lord Rothermere (Mail); Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, currently up for sale); and Reach PLC (Express, Star).

Then one can look at the people involved. Like Nigel Farage’s previous political vehicles, Reform is now becoming afflicted by splits and one of its five MPs, Rupert Lowe, has been expelled. However, Reform is also maturing and overcoming some of the problems that afflict new parties. It is establishing hundreds of local branches and adding many members. Instead of being visibly loony, some of these are credible as candidates to be your MP.

This is a kind of analysis that could have been done at any point in the last 40 years. It is the kind of thing you get when you tune into election night TV. The problem is that it fails to integrate two shifts that have taken place over that time, and which seem increasingly central. The first of these is the rise of social media, which is where most people are getting and discussing their news and is thus what shapes political attitudes. The second is the return after the post-World War II consensus of determined ideological warfare, as championed at Munich by JD Vance. This aims at competitive authoritarianism, a profound transformation of the state within the barest of constitutional parameters.

In both cases, there is an opaqueness; there are no maps that show us the state of the contest. The online environment cannot be reduced to a handful of accounts that are the equivalent of the newspapers and Elon Musk has turned off the APIs that allowed researchers to track Twitter’s evolution. The MAGA ideological position is not determined by a central committee and handed down; the extent to which people in the US or UK adhere to parts of it is mysterious.

We are thus bumping up against the self-imposed limits of contemporary social and political science. These disciplines are comfortable with the traditional form of analysis, narrow questions that can be empirically answered; they are uncomfortable with the big questions that ultimately concern us and where the empirical evidence is limited. To get some clarity, we need to understand how social media is working right now and integrate that into a complete picture. One way to do that is to start with an Italian Marxist who lived through the period of intense ideological conflict at the start of the 20th Century, Antonio Gramsci.

The war of position

We are living in a Gramscian world. This means not just that Gramsci’s analysis of politics in developed Western societies is still relevant, but that people of every political persuasion have oriented themselves around that analysis. Whenever you see the word “hegemony” in a social context or a meme that says, “Normalize this”, Gramsci is there.

Gramsci was a revolutionary and so the pervasiveness of this sort of language implies that both retail party politics and we as individuals are embedded in a ferment of parallel attempts at revolution, albeit revolutions achieved first (or only) through “wars of position” rather than “wars of manoeuvre” – terms Gramsci drew from military tactics which, with the war in Ukraine, remain appropriate today. The French and Russian revolutions were successful wars of manoeuvre – overthrows of the previous “political society” (government, army, police etc) through force. By contrast, Gramsci aimed at victory first through a war of position – penetration of “civil society” (schools, churches, clubs, newspapers, intellectuals etc) by a new hegemonic ideology, one that both dominates and leads.

The MAGA war of position in the US is today visible from space. One aspect of it is that the principle of providing federal funding to institutions of civil society that are autonomous is gone; rather, the quid pro quo demanded for funding is subservient integration into the new MAGA hegemony. This extends from government departments to schools and NGOs. In universities, for example, this integration requires changes in curriculum, leadership, research topic, and recruitment of both staff and students. As with the Constitution itself, the text of the university statutes will remain but be hollowed out. In line with the understanding of the war of position as a grinding social movement, there is no necessity for an immediate overthrow of all university administrations; rather, universities face an ever-tighter squeeze.

This is the war in a phase where it is led from the White House. For this reason comparisons with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, another war of position led from the top, are apt. But the current transformation has been decades in the making. The politicisation of the evangelical churches dates back to the 70s, the Republican war on science to the 80s. During these decades, a small number of wealthy backers had an outsized stimulus, but at the same time much of the work has come from below, increasingly through influencers on social media.

These influencers can be seen as a modern form of Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals”, arising as the economy has shifted from manufacturing to forms of knowledge work. For him, intellectuals functioned as officers of the established hegemony, or potentially a new hegemony, and were critical to its success in commanding consent. And traditional intellectuals such as clergy or philosophers were now supplemented by organic intellectuals arising from the new forms of production – including technicians, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and scientists.

Gramsci died in 1937, when the production line developed by Henry Ford for making motor cars was still paradigmatic. Today, however, the advance of technology means it’s no longer the case that you can have your car any colour so long as it is black. Fiat, where Gramsci tried to make a revolution out of strikes after World War I, now makes nine basic models of car, each with a dizzying array of options that go far beyond paint colours. In the language of a generation of critical thinkers, the mode of production is no longer Fordist but post-Fordist.

This shift can be seen as much in the production of ideas and beliefs as in the production of cars. The top-down, one-to-many, broadcast form of production in newspapers, radio and TV that disseminated a very limited range of views has been replaced by the many-to-many world of social media. In these circumstances, the organic intellectuals who actively engage in creating a new hegemony – politically-motivated online influencers – become even more critical.

MAGA is not the only force that has long waged a war of position. Gramsci’s Marxist followers have always pursued their own war of position. Feminists have been waging a war of position for more than a century. Gay liberation has been a war of position. The green movement is a war of position. All of these also aim to transform the social hegemony and often do so in a consciously Gramscian way. Campaigns of normalisation have been normalised and we live in an age of radicalism that makes conservatism if not an anachronism, then the perpetual target.

Despite this commonality, MAGA does not admit to adopting a Marxist strategy. One of the points of its preferred and bogus label, “cultural Marxism”, is to give the impression that the left is doing something the right isn’t.

There is nonetheless a difference between the use made of Gramsci on the left and on the right. The left has embraced the idea of a long march through the institutions of civil society and has, one might say, become institutionalised in the process. This is why the barb of “metropolitan elite” stings. The right by contrast is, at least for now, bypassing the institutions and relying instead on influencers without the same professional skills. Such influencers dominate Trump’s picks for top jobs in his administration and the question this raises is whether they are capable of running anything effectively.

The contested power of the right

Farage has spoken of Reform having a bottom-up social media strategy while the established parties have one that is top-down. This is accurate. While Reform relentlessly exhorts its members to generate their own content, the Labour Party asks me to go canvassing or passes on tightly controlled messaging from Cabinet ministers. Reform is generating its own organic intellectuals while Labour is generating cheap deliverers of leaflets. Reform treats its audience as an active participant while Labour treats it as a passive receiver of messages. Reform is following the MAGA playbook, Labour is not. Reform is doing more than retail politics, Labour is not.

Reform now has the advantage that the algorithms of the big social media platforms are being engineered to favour the right by the tech oligarchs who were standing in the front row at Trump’s inauguration.

But its advantage is more than that. Reform’s members are building on two decades of unmatched construction of online infrastructure by the right. Starting with Facebook groups in the noughties, this now extends across all the platforms and includes, for example, many of the biggest accounts on X. This allows Reform to shape the mainstream media narrative, allows far right themes to dominate informal discussion online and in podcasts, and drives real-world engagement with Reform at the school gate or bus stop. Further, there are huge armies of bots lurking in the wings, many controlled from Russia, ready to amplify the most toxic messaging at an election or in a crisis. Alarmed? You should be. This is a force that has the potential to swing elections.

At the same time, Reform’s own members are only part of the online right in the UK. Farage doesn’t own that franchise and what we are witnessing now is a three-cornered struggle between Farage, Rupert Lowe and the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to put themselves at the head of this force.

Farage quit his previous vehicle, UKIP, when it had self-radicalised to the point of admitting Tommy Robinson. The Robinson-as-member Rubicon was again one he declined to cross when falling out with Musk a couple of months ago. But Farage has failed to draw a line under the affair and this dispute over political direction seems to lie behind the decision to expel Lowe.

Lowe tweeted a few weeks back, “Let me spell this out for you - you can call me racist, I DO NOT CARE.” This is not as bombastic as the capital letters suggest – unlike Musk’s young DOGE militant, it does not explicitly embrace a racist identity. Still, it feels like a step in that direction and will appeal to more radical Reform members. If he gets support from Musk and the MAGA crowd, he also gets turbo-charged credibility among influencers on the right in the UK (and heaps of American money). With that, yes, he could perhaps usurp Farage.

While hitching your political fortune to the Americans has obvious attractions, it also comes with problems. The difficulty of what Lowe seems to be attempting is hinted at in a recent chart in the FT that indicates that, in terms of core political attitudes, the right in the UK is as close to the US left as the US right.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, although organisationally as behind the curve as Labour, has something immediate to play for – to supplant Reform as the party at the head of the mass of right-wing influencers. If you want to know why Badenoch seems at times to do little more than repeat dubious online claims, there’s your explanation.

Influence

If we want to understand the squeeze the UK is facing from the pincer movement, then we need to understand how politics is shaped by the online world of today. The character of the social media space and its connection to other spaces such as newspapers, TV and podcasts is constantly evolving. For example, there was a time in the US when Fox News set the agenda for political discussion on the right but today its role is primarily to repeat to a TV audience talking points that have already been developed online. In the UK, Marshall today seems happy to lose £30-40 million a year on GB News primarily to get video clips that can be circulated on social media as talking points. How does it all work now? To answer this question, let us turn to Renée DiResta, the author last year of Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Influencers are central to the platforms themselves. Each app has a different feature set and different people who spend most of their time on it, but the connectors in that social ecosystem are always people.

Influencer culture is unlike that found in traditional media. It’s a kind of informal back and forth where people don’t stay in their lane but instead reveal what's going on in their life. It's an integrated, participatory culture that builds a strong relationship between the influencer and the crowd.

“And the crowd becomes an amplifier,” says DiResta on a recent podcast with The Unpopulist. “The crowd moves content that the influencer … is making across all of the other platforms.”

“People really do like sharing and engaging with media that they feel is created for them, that they feel represents them and is speaking in the kind of voice that they themselves would be speaking in.”

This is a kind of activity that Gramsci would have approved of, for he saw Marxism as a philosophy aimed at critically engaging popular common sense.

However, influencers fear losing their audience if they don't deliver what the audience wants. At any moment they can come under pressure to avow or disavow someone or something.

“Because you are best able to monetize when you're appealing to a niche, there are other people who are competing with you for that same niche,” says DiResta. “So you do see creators who are willing to say the thing, willing to meet the worst impulses of where their audience might want them to go, who go and do that. That's when we talk about how did so-and-so get to be [like that]? I remember when a person … was a reputable reporter, and now look at them over here, they're like a UFO crank.”

The temptations for anyone on social media are the same that have long afflicted journalists and are neatly captured in the 2020 song Tabloid Newspaper by Hotel Lux in which the songwriter (credited as the entire band) reflects on his trade:

My favourite thing about telling a story is you can bollocks your way along

I start the first half of it a little white lie and then I just carry on

I like to blur the line between style and substance just to get my point across

I like to blur the line between truth and bollocks just to get my point across

I'm like a tabloid newspaper

I'm like a preacher man

Devoid of integrity

I'm a liar

I'm a twister of the truth

It seems to me that the peer pressure plays out differently in different networks because of an epistemic divide. While some influencers remain concerned to ensure that what they are sharing is true, others have gradually lost all qualms. We call these networks left and right, but these political positions seem to me less determinate than the epistemic positions.

The post-truth networks spread rumours at lightning speed.

“One of the things that we started seeing on the right in 2020, in the realm of election rumours was an absolute willingness to amplify,” says DiResta. “It would be like, ‘Big if true, someone should look into this.’ These crazy outlandish rumours – there was no cost to boosting them, but they would do this little verbal hedge, ‘Big if true, someone should look into this.’ Then by 2022, the verbal hedges were disappearing. It was like, ‘They're doing it again. They're stealing the election. Look at them. Here they are. Here they are doing it again.’”

This is a discourse of, to use the technical term, bullshit. It has ceased to matter whether claims that are made and spread are true or false. Given the living example of the longstanding master bullshitter, Trump himself, bullshit has been normalized.

Though the right is less scrupulous than the left, I don’t think this is the whole explanation for the emergence of the epistemic divide. Rather, the case can be made that the right is simply adapting to the intrinsic character of the modern world faster than the left.

Paraphrasing from an old essay on the decay of truth’s ideal cousin, beauty, by my smarter brother, Matthew, based on the ideas of another Italian Marxist who also cut his teeth organising workers in Fiat factories:

In a series of university lectures given in 2001 [three years before Facebook was invented] and published as A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno theorised a post-Fordist order in which a fluid, transnational multitude has a propensity for “curiosity” and “idle talk”. Whereas Heidegger regarded the two as types of inauthentic life, distorting our fundamental connection with the world through work, in Virno’s analysis they became crucial to contemporary production, which is founded on acts of communication.

Curiosity involves a desire for spectacle and leads to voyeurism.

Idle talk is chatter, gossip, rumour and radically undermines traditional broadcast speech. As “an event consisting of itself, which is justified solely by the fact that it happens” it “damages the referential paradigm”. Hence, idle talk constitutes a kind of creative destruction. Communication, instead of being about something given, “itself produces the state of things, unedited experiences, new facts”.

A world of idle talk is by its nature deeply post-truth. A world of curiosity is one that is thrilled by the contemptuous, narcissistic dismissals handed out by Trump and Musk – and, for those who choose to numb themselves to the suffering of those on the wrong end of the stick, a lot of fun.

The post-truth networks have become formidably creative meme-generating machines. New memes are constantly thrown out and what sticks, sticks. DiResta says there are two phases. “You've got people who are coming up with the messages and the memes that work, engaging with their audiences and doing that process of developing, just very organically – ‘This is how we talk about this’. Then there's the process of spreading it and sharing it and making sure people see it and these are not necessarily the same thing or the same people.”

This is an organic version of the – highly expensive and highly professional – way that election campaigns are now run with a host of often contradictory messages being trialled in parallel in the search for something that can gain more general traction.

Disorder

Because every influencer is doctrinally policed by their audience, the absolute epistemic freedom of the MAGA post-truth super-network is not matched by a political freedom. The result today is what Eliot Higgins, the founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism team, calls “disordered discourse”. In its disinterest in reality, disordered discourse echoes the idea of idle talk, but it adds to this a dynamic of discipline.

To sum up, what we are seeing here is a novel kind of politics. It’s not the “conventional”, Fordist, broadcast politics I grew up with. It’s not like a political party; there is no central committee to determine doctrine. It’s not like speakers in an antique forum – it’s too massive and disordered. Like a mob, it is leaderless, but unlike a mob it is shaped by long-honed structures of influence that make everyone both leader and follower. It doesn’t straightforwardly follow the dictates of oligarchs. It does not even have the uniformity of a hive mind.

The overall picture amounts to what we could call influencer politics. This is a kind of politics that emerges from the disordered post-Fordist attention economy in which anyone can create and share new ideas. Influencers create content for a chosen audience and are the organic intellectuals of an economy rooted in communication and remixing. They operate both off- and online but, unlike traditional media, their relationship with their audience is active and participatory, mediated through curiosity and idle talk. The claims and beliefs they articulate are disciplined by the fear of being punished by an audience that always has alternatives.

There is an epistemic divide between networks formed of influencers who cleave to truth as a value and those who don’t. Post-truth networks generate effective new content faster. In the MAGA super-network in the US this epistemic liberty is accompanied by political captivity and doctrinal violations are severely punished. Since there is no central authority to determine orthodoxy, doctrine is uncertain and may be disputed.

The Trump enigma

Trump’s policies, such as they are, seem designed to forestall any collapse of the disorder into something with more transparent doctrine. Take tariffs. Tariffs are everywhere but had been forgotten politically. One cannot say that higher tariffs are left-wing or right-wing. By focussing economic discussion on the question of tariffs, Trump makes such established political divides redundant and allows influencer politics to thrive; we’re all amateurs when it comes to tariffs. The same is true of his Greenland and Canada gambits – they allow influencers in the MAGA super-network to opt out of a mass of conventional political debates that have well-established grooves.

A similar feature has been pointed out by Adam Przeworski, a Polish-American political scientist. “To be ‘hegemonic’ in Gramsci's sense, an ideology must claim that the interests of those who rule coincide with the interest of everyone. ‘Trickle down’ is the mechanism which makes the interests of the rich compatible with those of everyone else in the neo-liberal ideology. But Trump ideologists are strangely silent even about trickling down. They identify their adversaries but seem unable to offer a forward-looking blueprint of a prosperous society free of conflict.”

In part, this reflects the extent to which the Trump machine is as much oligarchic as ideological. There are some signature issues that he bangs away on, such as illegal immigration and fentanyl, but he isn’t the one giving Nazi salutes. And in part it reflects the fact that political campaigns have become more sophisticated in the 90 years since Gramsci. Look at advertising. In the 1930s, advertisements made straightforward claims for the benefits of the product, however misleading.

Today, they often leave a gap where the message has to be created by the viewer in an Aha! moment.

The emptiness at the heart of Trump’s programme plays a similar trick. It allows his audience to see in his leadership what they want to see – white supremacy, libertarianism, techno-utopia, whatever. To make any kind of explicit claim as to how the governed are to benefit would be to destroy the magic.

Whether Trump’s strategy is a winner or a loser is unclear. His approval numbers are still ok and when Sky News went to the swing state of Pennsylvania, they found a lot of happy voters. The trouble for Trump is that the disorder now is not just communicative; it is real, and voters are noticing. CNN reports that Americans are googling “Trump” and “Chaos” at record levels.

Praxis

Techdirt recently published an article with the headline, “Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)”. I feel the same and feel obliged not just to analyse but to consider how to respond.

With regard to the Russian, military threat, Claude Malhuret, a French Senator and former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, has summarised with great clarity what needs to be done. Watch the video.

With regard to the American, ideological and algorithmic threat, the epistemic divide is in a way helpful. It defines a broad coalition, including for example many Republicans in the US, which is what is needed to resist the authoritarians now. On the other hand, we haven’t found a way of responding to the bullshit that’s politically sufficient. Fact checking hinders the right rather than defeating it.

Part of the response must be for those of us in the broad coalition to de-institutionalise ourselves and embrace the role of influencer. We have to start generating and sharing our own content, engaging in idle talk with our audience.

In addition, social media needs to be more tightly regulated. One approach would be to strip the platforms of the editorial power to determine who sees what, which could amount to banning the algorithms in social media – just follow people and see what they post.

Another approach, possibly additional, comes from George Orwell. In 1984, he described an antidote to the totalitarianism of Newspeak. “Freedom,” he wrote, “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Perhaps the kind of free speech we need to legislate for is one that allows the truth to shine, not one that allows post-truth influencers to smear bullshit across the face of our democracy.