PUBLISHED
August 31, 2019
https://truthout.org/articles/boris-johnson-takes-his-brexit-demagoguery-to-the-social-media-sphere/
On August 28, U.K. Prime
Minister Boris Johnson prorogued British
Parliament, which means that its current annual session will come to an end
earlier than expected. This will leave just a few days in early September for
the opposition to attempt to block a “no-deal” Brexit by passing emergency
legislation and/or trying to force out Johnson by a vote of no-confidence.
Labour Party leader Jeremy
Corbyn described Johnson’s move as “a threat to our democracy” and spoke of a
“constitutional outrage” and a “smash and grab of our democracy by the Prime
Minister.” Chanting “Stop the coup,” thousands protested in
Central London and other cities after Johnson’s suspension of Parliament. The
fight over a no-deal Brexit between Johnson’s government and Parliament will
enter a hot and decisive phase when the British Parliament reconvenes after its
summer recess on September 3.
Brexit’s Long History
Johnson came to power as part
of a revolt of the most right-wing factions in the Conservative Party against
former Prime Minister Theresa May, whom they saw as secretly wanting to remain
in the European Union (EU). The members of these groups assumed that she was
not tough enough in the negotiations of a withdrawal agreement between Britain
and the EU.
Bottom of Form
Johnson argues that the EU has
to drop the so-called “backstop,” an aspect of the withdrawal agreement that
leaves the U.K. in the EU Customs Union in case no solution can be found that
allows preventing a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Johnson
says that if the EU does not change its position on the backstop, then Britain
will leave without an agreement on World Trade Organization terms and with “no
ifs, no buts” on October 31. He speaks of wanting to use alternative
technological arrangements instead of a physical border between Ireland and
Northern Ireland, but such means do not exist. They are mere
techno-deterministic fantasies.
Johnson’s political plans
include further reducing corporation tax and lowering the income tax rate for
those who earn more than £80,000 per year. Many observers believe
that behind the scenes, Johnson is preparing for a general election and will
try to blame the EU,
the British Parliament and
anti-Brexit members of Parliament for the breakdown of negotiations in order to
mobilize voters. At the same time, in light of the G7 summit, Johnson and President
Trump have both talked about wanting to establish a free trade deal between the
U.S. and the U.K. Such a deal could result in the privatization of public
services, the further deregulation of working conditions, and the lowering of
food and consumer standards.
On August 27, leaders of the
opposition parties met in order to plan for passing emergency legislation during
the first two weeks of September, when the British Parliament will sit after
its summer recess and before another break during which the British parties’
annual conferences will take place. Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour
Party, the Scottish Nationalists, the Liberal Democrats, the Welsh party Plaid
Cymru, the Green Party, independent members of Parliament, and potentially some
Tories who oppose Johnson’s position on Brexit plan to pass a law that would stop a no-deal Brexit.
On August 28, the Johnson
government got the Queen to prorogue
Parliament. Prorogation is the period between the end of one parliamentary session
(one parliamentary year) and the start of the next one that is opened by the
Queen’s Speech. Johnson’s prorogation of parliament reduces the time available
to the opposition to try to block a no-deal Brexit.
The prime minister’s move
indicates that he is scared of the opposition blocking his no-deal Brexit
plans, and that he wants to circumvent these plans by minimizing the time available
to parliamentary business before October 31. An unplanned “no-deal” rupture
between the U.K. and the EU without a withdrawal agreement would very likely
bring back a physical border between
Ireland and Northern Ireland, which could flare up and bring back the “Troubles
in Northern Ireland” or, as the more pessimistic observers argue, be the
trigger of a war in
Europe.
There are only speculations
about what consequences a “no-deal” Brexit would mean for Britain. The British
and the EU economy are highly interlinked via imports
and exports. In 2018, 78.2 percent of the U.K.’s import value of pharmaceutical
products, including human blood and medicines, were coming from EU
countries. In 2018, medicinal and pharmaceutical products accounted
for 6.7 percent of the value of all British imports from the EU. A
leaked government memo revealed that the Johnson administration expects food
and medicine shortages in
the case of a no-deal Brexit.
Johnson’s demagoguery has also
extended to social media.
“People’s PMQs” as Ideology
On August 14, Johnson
broadcast the first “People’s
Prime Minister’s Question Time” via 10 Downing Street’s Facebook page that
has around 630,000 followers.
At 11 am, a message was posted
that called for users to ask questions: “Get ready for the first ever #PeoplesPMQs later
today. Put your questions to the [prime minister] by commenting on this post.”
At 12:15 pm, the broadcast started. In the 75 minutes that were available to
post questions, a total of 956 comments were made. The broadcast lasted for 11
minutes. Johnson answered eight questions, which means he devoted roughly 80
seconds to each selected comment.
The eight questions focused on
the topics of leaving the EU, the British Union, preventing Parliament from
blocking Brexit, restoring the British people’s faith in politics, the
alienation of rural communities from Westminster politics, mental health
services, knife crime and political heroes.
The selected questions allowed
Johnson to present himself as the savior who will deliver Brexit on October 31
and thereby gives a voice to, as he said in the broadcast, “people in towns and
regions of the U.K. feeling that they weren’t being heard.” He presented
himself as the leader who will make Britain flourish, implement tough law-and-order
policies and, like Pericles of Athens, is a “powerful articulator of the idea
of democracy.”
During the People’s PMQs, no
critical questions were selected that scrutinized Johnson’s position on Brexit,
his worldview, political convictions or actions. There was very little time for
the preparation of questions. For example, the following comment was not taken
up:
I require weekly infusions of
human immunoglobulin to keep me alive. Human [Immunoglobulin G] cannot be
stockpiled as it is a plasma product. Human [Immunoglobulin G] also cannot be
produced in the UK due to the British population being at risk from [Variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease]. What cast-iron guarantees can you give me, and the
thousands of other patients in the UK who require this lifelong and life-saving
treatment that supplies would not become difficult to obtain if no deal
happens. If there was a shortage of this product, then the health of thousands
of citizens could be at risk. Cancer patients also frequently require Human
[Immunoglobulin G] during chemo as their immune systems deplete.
The format of People’s PMQs
does not encourage citizens to come together to discuss politics and then
together formulate comments and inputs; it advances individualistic,
superficial, high-speed political communication. If we understand political
communication as engaged dialogue of several individuals on equal grounds, then
Johnson’s social media format is not at all a form of communication, because it
does not allow for real dialogue.
The People’s PMQs is highly
instrumental. It gives the prime minister’s social media team the power to
select questions that allow him to present himself as positively as possible.
There is no independent selection of questions that fosters critical scrutiny.
Further, the communication
style of short questions and short answers is typical of demagogic politics.
Such a politics accelerates superficial political communication, advances
tabloidization, does not provide sufficient time for in-depth discussion, and
ultimately represents an informational space that does not foster dialogue and
debate. The People’s PMQ more resembles an emperor talking to his entourage
than a democratic conversation.
Moreover, the selected
questions were partly edited. For example, the question, “What are you going to
do to protect our Union of Nations” reads in full: “Now we are leaving the
[Common Agricultural Policy], do you think it’s now time for more a green high
tech revolution in farming? If so what policies do you have for this? Plus what
are you going to do to protect our Union of Nations.”
In his answers, Johnson not
only presented himself as the voice of the British people who will deliver
Brexit, but also communicated a deep division between those wanting Brexit,
whom he described as the British people on the one side, and the EU and anti-Brexit
members of Parliament on the other side. “There is a terrible kind of collaboration,
as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in
Parliament and our European friends,” he said. Johnson uses the word
“collaboration” in the context of the highly contentious political topic of
Brexit. He fosters resentments by appealing to the meaning of the word
as “traitorous cooperation with an enemy.”
True, deliberative democracy fosters
engaged political conversations and debates as foundations of informed
decision-making. Participatory democracy extends democracy from elections to
other realms, such as the economy and public institutions, and allows those who
are affected by decisions and organizations to take part in these
organization’s governance and decision-making processes.
Given its instrumental,
accelerated, individualistic, demagogic and tabloid character, Johnson’s use of
social media in his People’s PMQs neither advances deliberative nor
participatory democracy but rather, authoritarian plebiscitary politics. The
plebiscitary state is based on pseudo-participation, where citizens are allowed
to selectively and occasionally voice their opinions and vote on questions and
matters that were selected by a charismatic political leader.
The People’s PMQs exemplifies
this pseudo-participation, where political voice is handled in a highly selectively
and instrumental manner that allows a political leader to worship himself in a
self-congratulatory manner.
Social Media and the Public
Sphere
In his 1932 book, Legality
and Legitimacy, the fascist German legal theorist Carl Schmitt saw
“plebiscitary legitimacy” as “the single type of state justification that may
be generally acknowledged today as valid.” He was aware that the plebiscitary
state advances tendencies of the “authoritarian state” and the “total state.”
Further, Schmitt argues that plebiscitary politics means “authority from above,
confidence from below” and requires “a government or some other authoritarian
organ in which one can have confidence that it will pose the correct question
in the proper way.”
In the age of social media,
demagogic authority from above does not mean control of what questions are
asked, but control and selection of the questions and the pieces of information
that gain public visibility. Digital plebiscitary communication is a political
instrument that controls and manipulates attention and visibility in the online
public sphere.
In his classic work on the Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues that,
at the time of absolute monarchies, the public sphere meant that the emperor
“displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of ‘higher’
power.” Representation meant the repeated presentation of authoritarian power
to the public and of an “aura” that “surrounded and endowed” this authority.
For Habermas, the feudal public sphere is a pseudo-public that is based on the
“staging of the publicity.”
The People’s PMQs advances the
digital re-feudalization of the public sphere. Political voice is stage-managed
in a selective manner and instrumentalized in a digital spectacle that is
designed to present the charismatic aura of a single person. Re-feudalization
means to “procure plebiscitary agreement from a mediatized public by means of a
display of staged or manipulated publicity.”
In the first People’s PMQs,
Johnson pointed out that Pericles is one of his political heroes. Pericles was
a Greek army general and statesman who lived in the fifth century B.C. In his
book, Pericles of Athens, historian of ancient Greece Vincent Azoulay
points out that many of his contemporaries saw Pericles as “despicable
demagogue” who “had the most astonishingly great thoughts of himself” and
possessed the “ability to turn black into white — and, in particular, to
persuade his listeners that he had won a fight when, in fact, he had lost it.”
Pericles’s speeches were criticized for their “tyrannical haughtiness.” His
“self-glorification attracted virulent criticism.”
Johnson’s People’s PMQs can,
in some sense, indeed be seen as having some Periclean aspects. It is an
example of the use of social media for political, digital, and authoritarian
demagoguery and the feudalization of the public sphere.
Right-Wing Authoritarianism
and the Media
The right-wing use of the
means of communication for creating a pseudo-public sphere has a longer
history. In his book, The
Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, critical
theorist Theodor W. Adorno analyses how the Christian demagogue Martin Luther
Thomas used radio to spread far-right propaganda in the U.S. in the 1930s.
Following in the footsteps of
this tradition, since 1984, Rush Limbaugh has moderated a right-wing talk radio
show. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Alex Jones are among those who built on
Limbaugh’s right-wing use of broadcasting. The creation of Fox News in
1996 gave the reach of right-wing media a further boost.
The rise of the internet and
social media has brought a new level of interactivity to the public
dissemination of right-wing propaganda. For example, far-right Canadian
YouTuber Andy Warski’s channel has
around 250,000 followers, and far-right U.K. Independence Party member Carl
Benjamin’s Sargon of Akkad channel has
more than 950,000 subscribers. Such videos often reach several hundred thousand
views and achieve thousands of comments. False news sites such as Breitbart operate
their own platforms and are active on multiple social media sites such as
Facebook (Breitbart: 3.8 million followers), Twitter (more than 1.1 million
followers), Instagram (480,000 followers) and YouTube (135,000 subscribers).
With almost 65 million
followers, President Trump’s Twitter profile is the far-right medium with the
largest audience. In the book, Digital
Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter, I
analyze Trump’s politics and his use of Twitter. An empirical analysis showed
that top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/enemy-scheme and
militant patriarchy are key ideological features of Trump’s use of Twitter.
Right-wing demagogues are at the same time self-centred and pretend to
represent the people’s interests.
Johnson and Trump’s uses of
social media are the latest development in and expressions of right-wing media
use that advances pseudo-participation as the means of instrumental reason,
where right-wing leaders maintain the ultimate voice and control communication
power in the public sphere.
What Is to Be Done Against the
New Right-Wing Radicalism?
In contemporary capitalism,
the rise of new authoritarianism and new nationalisms are the result of the
negative dialectic of neoliberal capitalism and the new imperialism. The
commodification of everything — entrepreneurialism, privatization,
deregulation, financialization, globalization, deindustrialization,
outsourcing, precarization and the new individualism — have backfired, extended
and intensified inequalities and crisis tendencies, which created a futile
ground for new nationalisms and right-wing radicalism.
How should the left best
counteract against nationalism and right-wing
authoritarianism? German philosopher Theodore W. Adorno suggests
that it is wrong to practice a left-wing populism that imitates the tactics and
strategies of the far right. Progressive media and communication should not
“put lies against lies” but rather “counteract by the sweeping power of reason
and the really unideological truth.”
What we need is not a
demagogic and authoritarian internet, but rather a public service internet with public
service formats that advance the power of critical reason against
ideology.
