6th November 2025
They now need to work out how to exercise and retain power
Yesterday this blog set out that many in politics and media are trapped in a latter-day Plato’s cave of social media, unable to make sense of the world about them other than by looking at projected shadows.
But there is currently another aspect of social media that is worth remarking upon, especially in the light of the campaigning and victory of the new mayor-elect of New York, and also here in England of the campaigning of the new leader of the Green party.
One tactic which they adopt is to take the nasty and spiteful coverage of them by illiberal news outlets, and to simply turn it on its head. Instead of being cowered by the relentless personal and political hostility, they use it as part of their own campaigning. It is an unafraid approach, and it renders the unpleasant attacks fairly impotent.
This should not be surprising – our post-Enlightenment ways of thinking means that we can expect each effect to have an equal and opposite effect, a thesis to have its antithesis, that demand will be met by supply, and so on.
Just because the illiberals were the best first-movers on how to use social media platforms it does not necessarily mean that they retain that first-mover advantage. Those opposed to illiberalism can, in turn, develop fresh and innovative tactics to replace those now-clumsy approaches which have failed before.
A Schumer can be replaced by a Mamdani.
What we, in a more jaded time than the optimism of Enlightenment thinking, realise is that conflict and confrontation is not always a prelude to a happy equilibrium: things break down, thesis and antithesis do not resolve as a synthesis, markets do not clear and are certainly never ‘perfect’.
So while one can welcome the fact that liberals (and progressives and socialists) are no longer at any inherent disadvantage at his time of internet-based campaigning, such witty online deftness is not in and of itself sufficient to defeat the illiberals.
As the post here yesterday set out, social media is only one element amongst others when seeking to force political change – others are constitutional structures (and lack of structures), patterns of political participation, and social and economic contexts.
That said, the first job of a politicians is to work out how to get power – and that is a precondition of exercising and retaining power.
But fresh and innovative thinking is also required about how to exercise and retain power – against what will be a formidable illiberal push-back – as well as in campaigning.
Liberals (and progressives and socialists) are now working out how to meet the political challenge of modern campaigning; they now need to meet the equal (and perhaps opposite) challenge of modern governing.
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A Schumer can be replaced by a Mamdani.
Or, perhaps, by an Ocasio-Cortez?
Alongside this rather cheeky response to DAG, I would like to make a more salient point. When AOC was first elected to Congress, the attacks were brutal and relentless, but what set her apart from so many of her contemporaries was the surgical-strike nature of her clap-backs.
She managed to find a sharper edge – not going on all-out attacks in the style of some presidents, but remaining passive until someone lacking social media and basic situational awareness skills would make a thoughtless comment. Then she would respond instantly, oft-times brutally and with clinical effectiveness.
But.
When the attacks stopped, so did the clap-backs.
I think there’s a very important lesson there – and in the case of AOC [who is not without flaws, like all of us] an indication of maturity far beyond her years. Barack Obama is often cited as one of the greatest orators of our times and I don’t think anyone would claim that for AOC.
But she is one of the most effective *communicators* of our times.
As the saying goes, “A wise person speaks because they have something to say; a fool because they have to say something.”.
Social media might actually be a pretty effective way of distinguishing between the two.
More importantly, the theme of this post is campaigning effectively in the modern age. Campaigning is implicitly communicating. One of the greatest indicators of the health of the modern US Democratic Party is the way that they deeply understand the importance of communication paradigms, realise that the modern era has shifted to new communication platforms and ways of consuming news, and recognised that the older, more senior members of the party have an urgent need to stop, listen to and learn from their younger but much more media savvy junior members.
Oh, wait.
As a Cuomo is supposed to have said, “Campaign in poetry, govern in prose”.
Mario, not Andrew.
I am reminded of an alleged incident at an outdoor hustings, which David Lloyd George was addressing.
DLG was speaking in support of Home Rule.
“Home Rule all round for Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.”
Then a wag in the crowd shouted out something like, “And for Hell!”
Quick as a flash, DLG responded, “Indeed, let every man speak for his own country.”
As a former actor, Zack Polanski knows not just how to learn and deliver his lines, but breathe life into them too.
It is rather a novelty to have a political leader, particularly a Green Party leader in the United Kingdom, seeking to find common ground with voters who might not in the past have ever considered voting for his party.
I am predicting him getting, at least, the loan of the votes of some One Nation Conservatives appalled by their party doffing its reputation as a party, members of which helped draw up the European Convention on Human Rights, that stands up for the rights of the individual against a sometimes overweening state, and as a party of law and order, and of the countryside.
Polanski, one of George Orwell’s quiet patriots, does not frighten the horses.
In fact, he is rather solicitous of their health.
In my personal view – and others may not agree – the thorniest issues confronting many governments these days do not emanate from within the country but from outside the country. The most obvious example is migration. This is a conundrum for the United States, for the EU and for our own country, all of which are struggling to address it. But they cannot address it because they do not control it and they cannot control it because the source is outside the country. It is not a national problem, it is a global problem. Climate change is another example.
The only tools that humanity has to try to address these global issues are its c 200 national governments. What humanity now needs are – in addition to its national governments – are some forms of global governance. The EU could perhaps teach us some lessons here – it is obviously not a form of global governance but it is a model of how 27 countries share power to address some of their common problems.
I have been under the impression, for a long time, that the beginning of political electioneering through social media really began with Obama’s presidential win. Didn’t his win perplex the pundits until they looked closer at what his campaign did?
I think it was an informed, well thought out blend of the ground war and the air war.
The media and, naturally, social media businesses, and let us not forget that both are out to make a profit, like to stress the importance of the air war.
Visits and clicks generate revenue.
However, you cannot hold ground from the air, and the youth may be online, but they are a shrinking group of voters, in comparison with older generations who may not be as accessible via social media.
And, whilst I accept the evidence that a lot of money was spent during the Brexit Referendum Campaign online in the interest of Leave and that at least some of it came from dubious sources, I do not believe it had much impact on the outcome.
A narrow win for Leave, got over the line by ABC1 voters, who in England made up 59% of the votes cast in favour of Brexit.
A vote concentrated in Southern England.
In fact, it was Surrey Golf Club Man wot won it for Leave, not Sunderland Car Worker.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc would seem to apply in the context of the money spent online for Leave and the result of the referendum.
And, if the adman’s equivalent of the Alchemist’s Stone had been discovered by the marketing industry at the time of the Brexit Referendum, did they lose it straight afterwards?
As I have said on here before, one of the Lever brothers said he had been told by his marketing people that only 50% of his company’s advertising spend was effective.
Alas, he went on to say, they could not tell him which 50%.
If I remember it rightly, the Obama Presidential Campaign first time out made much of the small donations they were receiving from supporters.
The total of which, however, turned out to have been dwarfed by financial contributions from the usual suspects.
But news stories about those small donations, which were made mostly online, I think, probably bought Barack Obama more publicity for his campaign than the equivalent total could buy him in the normal way.
Some smart cookies were working for Obama.
I detect about Zach Polanski more than a degree of the professionalism of the New Labour campaign in the run up to the 1997 General Election.
Polanski recently made a point about Reform on a television programme that was expanded upon subsequently on social media.
The social media post provided evidence to support the point made on television.
A subtle blend of old and new media, if one may still call social media, new.
Polanski clearly has his own Excalibur.
Excalibur was a database built up by the Labour Party before the 1997 General Election, wherein were entered details of individual MPs with information about policy positions they held and comments they had made.
A Labour MP going on BBC Question Time, for example, might be briefed about the views of the other politicians on the topics likely to come up.
Of course, back then, the Internet as a source of such information was very much in its infancy.