Just like writers, political analysts are given to the 'narrative fallacy'. It's the tendency to take a bunch of complicated and even random facts and boil them down into a simple but slightly misleading story. After Brexit, the unstoppable forces of nativism were on the march. Then after, Macron sensible centrism was back. Now the radical left, with unstoppable elan, seems to be the politics of the future.
Read more: Final election poll gives Jeremy Corbyn the lead over Theresa May for the first time
One key element of the latest narrative is the idea that the internet swung it for Corbyn, in two acts:
1. The Tory press, which did all it could to undermine Cor-bin, has lost its power. It's being supplanted by ‘alternative media’ (Canary, Another Angry Voice, etc) and its shareable social media content.
2. Young people, so at ease with this new world, found or created an alternative message online, and reached/mobilised millions with a message of hope and progressive politics.
As ever there is some truth to this (although it’s remarkable how short our collective memories are: only a few months ago we’d all agreed the radical right had outsmarted the left online). But something far bigger is happening, which is changing fundamentally people’s attitudes toward political parties, leaders and ideas. It’s more important than Brexit or Trump or Corbyn. The internet, having disrupted our economies, has moved onto our political system, and is changing what we expect of our leaders. This has helped Corbyn, but could very quickly swing against him too.
First, the internet is making politics more emotional.
The digital prophets told us long ago that limitless information and total connectivity would make us more informed, less bigoted and kinder. But they ignored human nature. The internet is an overwhelming smorgasbord of competing facts, claims, blogs, data, masquerading propaganda, misinformation, investigative journalism, charts, different charts, commentary and reportage. It's too much! By necessity in our busy lives, we pay attention to the one person making more noise than anyone else, and we only have time to click on that funny thing at the top of our feeds or the thing our friends – who think like us – have posted. Emotional heuristics, essentially shortcuts for the mind, are necessary to make sense of the confusion.
This means the leader's personality is elevated above all else, since it is the easiest heuristic tool we have, a simple proxy for all other things. I don't recall an election that was more about personalities than this one. Mother Theresa running through wheat-fields, strong and stable, Corbyn doing the dab et cetera. As I argue in my new book Radicals, the most successful digital politicians of this century are Donald Trump and Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, and neither ever held office before. Both were extremely famous personalities in their own right.
The Corbyn supporters will, of course, respond that he won on the ‘issues’. But I’m not convinced. Because lots of his policies enjoyed high levels of support even when he was 20 points behind in opinion polls. The key shift in polls seemed to be when May was revealed as neither strong nor stable; and when Corbyn was found out to not be a complete duffer after all, but actually pretty persuasive and apparently consistent in his views.
People determined they liked Corbyn more than they thought, and they disliked May more than her advisers expected. They liked the fluency of his rage against injustice; his naturalness about saving the NHS. But she couldn’t connect emotionally, could she? Maybot just couldn’t ‘connect’ with ordinary people. That's just not good enough now. I doubt John Major would have beaten Neil Kinnock if we’d had Twitter and Facebook in 1992. Further proof: May’s inability to actually speak to the families from Grenfell Tower. The contrast between her aloof distance and Corbyn’s willingness to comfort and console in person couldn’t have been clearer. It turned an already disastrous week into a potentially terminal one.
Second, and this helps explain the above, is the way the internet has transformed ‘authenticity’ into a peerless political attribute.
We now expect that our elected officials can eat Pringles like a teenager, drink pints like a functioning alcoholic, and wear high vis jacket and hardhats like a builder etcetera. Otherwise, they're not real.
Why is this?
Authenticity is in part an inevitable rebellion against decades of lifeless managerialism and the slow process of politicians becoming a class apart from their electors. Consider: the single most common background of Labour MPs in the last parliament was ‘political organisers’, essentially professional politicians – advisers, activists, organisers, campaigners. In 1979, 16 per cent of MPs were drawn from ‘manual professions’; by 2015 it was just 3 per cent. The narrow casting tendency is magnified when, inevitably as a politician, your social standing and circles change.
At some point - I really don't know when it was exactly - politicians stopped sounding like ordinary people. They slowly lost the hard-won ability to talk like functioning human beings. By the nineties and noughties they’d become trapped in a web of focus groups and media lines. They were stage-managed, given ‘lines’, prepared, briefed. The larynx was engaged and the correct words were ejected (hard-working families, best for Britain, etc) but the brain was largely undisturbed.
The reason this absurdity worked at all was because it could be centrally controlled: Alistair Campbell was rushing around and leaning on people, enforcing some degree of message discipline. But the internet kills message discipline. And people can see more easily through the charade of machine-like message delivery. In an age when everyone communicates, shares and comments on everything, inauthenticity gets found out. This is why YouTubers are so successful. They appear real, even where they’re not. That’s why Corbyn’s lovingly called the absolute boy, something you knowingly call your mate. Cringeworthy photo ops with politicians trying to drink pints; or ‘thunderclapped’ tweets; or strong and stable on repeat; or stage managed events at workerless factories – they all look risible. And pathetic. And also weird.
In fact, the Conservatives almost certainly misunderstood the whole nature of online life. The alt-left media was producing nicely made content and sharing it manically online. Agree or not, it was real stuff shared by real people, some of whom were more active than a Russian bot. The Tories appeared to believe they could match it with lots of sponsored links and micro-targeted adverts. But nothing screams ‘not authentic’ like links that say 'sponsored by the Conservative Party’ underneath.
Corbyn came from a different world to spin doctors and focus groups. A great handicap under Blair was transformed into an advantage once the campaign started.
He didn’t seem to be acting or pretending. He just carried on doing what he’d always done, pitching up with the same un-triangulated messages, reading from the soft gospel of peace and decency, with flashes of righteous indignation.
The wrong-about-nearly-everything analysts said he was stubborn and stuck in the 1980s, but most ordinary people saw consistency and authenticity.
He went viral many times. May didn’t go really go viral once. That’s probably why she didn’t do as well as we all expected. May had zero virality.
That sentence above is the sort of thing that serious people like me now say regularly in public. I don't know if it's silly or potentially true or inane or ironic. No-one can really tell.
What we do know, is the internet dissolves boundaries. Between the places companies are based and where they pay tax; between who wins an election and who does not; between who’s a member of a movement and who’s just a tweeter; between what’s a joke and what’s not. In such a confusing, emotional, boundary-less world, someone like Corbyn can sink and then suddenly soar.
This is more than alt-media or young people on Twitter or viral content. The internet is changing what sort of attributes we demand from our leaders. Emotional and authentic. On this occasion, Labour did better than Tories online. Last year it helped Trump for the exact same reason.
On 15th May 2017, the Conservative Party had a 19-point poll lead over the Labour party. One month later Labour had a three-point lead. Only emotions can swing that hard and that fast: from love to hate, admiration to contempt. The analytical mind isn’t nearly so volatile, and authenticity can be quickly lost. Today’s trending topic is tomorrow’s uncool and overshared meme.
Jamie Bartlett is director at Demos’ Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, and author of "Radicals".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
