While the “new left” has long celebrated the transformative potential of the digital realm, what has probably come as a considerable shock to the left is how effectively the far right has mobilised these potentials to their benefit instead.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” — John Maynard Keynes
The digitalisation of the public conversation space in 2024 has enabled a set of social, political and economic vulnerabilities that societies everywhere face and must respond to.
Fundamentally, it has become a space where “truth” is being contested, as myriad sectoral actors – as well as domestic and foreign actors – devote significant resources towards establishing their versions of the truth, winning over public opinion for ideological and personal interests, whether political, private or socio-cultural.
That is, the digital realm is increasingly playing a key role in the contestation for power, where power is obtained through mainstreaming selected narratives into the public arena and influencing public opinion.
The power of disinformation is proving to be a major challenge to societies everywhere. Between 30 July to 5 August 2024, far-right and right-wing riots spread across the United Kingdom, spurred on by blatant online disinformation that had no basis in fact.
The tragic murder of three children – and the critical wounding of eight other children and two adults – on 29 July 2024 was exploited by online far-right groups and high-profile far-right accounts who spread disinformation about the perpetrator’s identity, nationality, religion and immigration status.
By stoking and feeding Islamophobic, xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment, resentment quickly spiralled out of control, and violent riots rapidly arrested the UK, endangering refugees, Muslims and immigrants across the country.
This serves as a stark reminder that the threats posed by the digitalisation of the public space are substantive and growing, and that devoted efforts are required to establish effective ways of countering them.
At the same time, the digitalisation of the public conversation space also offers up a critical opportunity to foster greater cohesion, tolerance, robust informed engagement with issues of public interest, active participation in the political realm, and deepening progressive democratic norms.
The digital realm is also a profoundly new and powerful means through which to challenge power and authority.
Earlier this year, Kenyan youth took to the streets in protest against an ill-advised new tax bill that came at a time of economic hardship for Kenyans.
The Gen-Z dominated protesters leveraged the digital realm in a wide variety of simple and novel ways to organise protest action and exert pressure on Kenyan politicians and authorities, demonstrating that the promise of digital activism as a significant tool in holding power to account is alive and well.
The paradox of democracy
In “The Paradox of Democracy”, Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing consider democracy as a “culture of free expression”, and in doing so diagnose democracy as particularly vulnerable to different forms of persuasion, which may in turn pose a threat to democracy itself.
As they put it, the paradox is produced by “a free and open communication environment that, because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within”. They go further to state that “this tension sits at the core of every democracy, and it can’t be resolved or circumnavigated… the essential democratic freedom – the freedom of expression – is both ingrained in and potentially harmful to democracy”.
As the word “paradox” indicates, democracy is facing a foundational complexity, one that the authors demonstrate has always existed, but which is rendered far less predictable in the digital era, which hosts the potential to mobilise discursive power from a far more distributed and unpredictable set of sources and knowledges.
These may, in turn, combine in unexpected ways to yield unforeseen outcomes, posing threats to the status quo, traditional norms, and progressive visions of society that decry traditionalism in identity construction.
The digitalisation of communications is significantly transforming the hegemonic hold that traditional, centralised media and communications possesses. Social media, open media and the diversification of digital communications platforms now presents opportunities for those whose values and identity constructions fall outside of the mainstream narratives regarding progress and modernity – themselves heavily loaded terms – to exert significant discursive power through the mere fact of being online.
In many ways a profound democratisation of media and communications is unfolding, and we have yet to see where it leads.
Inconvenient intersections
While the “new left” has long celebrated the transformative potential of the digital realm, and particularly its potential to mount distributed resistances that confound hegemonic discursive power, what has probably come as a considerable shock to the left is how effectively the far-right and right-wing conservatives have mobilised these potentials to their benefit instead.
This begs for a critique of advocacy in its current form, and particularly what is “inconvenient” for progressive and left-wing aspirations and agendas. Specifically, what has emerged as anathema and contestation to left wingers and progressives is the emergence of what can be termed “inconvenient intersections”.
This can be illustrated by way of a “thought experiment”. For example, it is a commonly held view to associate the anti-abortion agenda with right-wing Christians in the US Midwest. Indeed, this is the view that most Western mainstream media outlets typically allude to, and it may indeed be a partially correct perspective.
However, it may come as a surprise to most on the left that Rastafarianism is also anti-abortionist in orientation. This is not to assert that there are any anti-abortionist allegiances forming between these groups, but rather to illustrate that the potential exists to mobilise two generally ideologically incompatible groups around the same public interest issue.
And there are likely very many more such intersections that can be exploited to drive support for right-wing agendas. These “inconvenient intersections” fly in the face of conventional left-wing wisdom, enabling right-wing activists to mobilise hitherto disparate groups – which may otherwise be at odds with each other – into the same camp on specific public interest issues.
In this way, people who don’t regard themselves as leaning to the right may be coaxed into supporting right-wing talking points and agendas. Left wing and progressive agendas are confounded by these inconvenient intersections.
And, in truth, they are more than just inconvenient to the left and progressives; they constitute a veritable and substantial challenge to their ideological foundations.
Loosely speaking, common to both the Western right-wing and traditionalist cultures is an espoused rejection of the globalisation of progressive values, and the globalisation of their economies. This in turn enables the emergence of a complex span of inconvenient intersections.
For example, with respect to intersections of: patriarchy and gender (e.g. the assertion of traditional masculinity, male “rights” perspectives and conservative notions of family); religious supremacy and religious conservatism (e.g. Christian, Hindu and Islamic conservatism and supremacy); race, religion and ethnicity (e.g. white Christendom and replacement theory, or Hindutva); ultra-nationalism and anti-globalist protectionism (e.g. Brexit, US Maga republicans); media and elite power (e.g. anti-mainstream media rhetoric and narratives); anti-statism and/or anti-education positions (e.g. anti-critical race theory and evolutionary theory among the US Christian right – or anti-female education and emancipation in traditionalist cultures and religions); ultra-nationalism and xenophobia (e.g. in Western Europe, UK and US); not to mention anti-science positions (eg climate denialism, and scepticism of Western medicine).
Common cause
Along with the inconvenient intersections that present to the far right and right-wing conservatives, where they find common cause with other traditionalist and socially conservative groups, perhaps a common flaw in both the messaging of the right and the left is that they tend to deploy “same-speak” as a strategy to corral in-group sentiment and identification.
This is a moribund echo-chamber strategy, being mostly coercive in orientation – albeit implicitly – rather than utilitarian or identitive. It serves more to reinforce than resolve the aforementioned paradox of democracy.
A strictly binary engagement in this sociocultural and political context may serve to deepen societal divisions. When activism is viewed as a contestation between virtue and evil – as advocacy-based approaches tend to – it fails to fully appraise the complexity of the different framings that are brought to bear on public interest issues.
This is especially the case because in turn, these framings can all potentially garner outsized attention simply by virtue of being expressible through the variety of channels that the digital realm enables. They only have to “touch a nerve”, so to speak.
Culture wars: towards an activism of diplomacy
In a context fraught with myriad opportunities for the exploitation of inconvenient intersections, fuelled by fear of change, we are not simply living through an era of rampant disinformation. Rather, we are living through an era characterised by a culture war that has been significantly democratised by the decentralisation of media and communications through digitalisation.
That is, in this new culture war, discursive power can be mobilised through adaptive, distributed networks (ie heterarchically) to great effect; it can emerge from unexpected spaces, link in unexpected ways through networks, and yield unpredictable outcomes once mobilised.
Here, affect or emotion is a far more effective mass mobilising force than ideology or reason. In this new terrain, advocacy-based approaches – which typically advocate for one side of an issue in opposition to another (i.e. in a binary fashion) – are unlikely to be able to cope with the complexity of framings that arise (i.e. particularly around inconvenient intersections), and so tend to feed divisions rather than help overcome them.
Hence, instead of an activism of advocacy, it is perhaps prudent to begin considering moving towards an activism of diplomacy instead. Put another way, a stance of activist diplomacy, would have – as its central prerogative – the development of an active citizenry that is engaged in self-organising conversations from which social cohesion and consensus emerges.
Rather than being confronted with advocacy, which invokes binary positions, an activist diplomacy enables an engagement with a greater diversity of views and positions, while holding differences in play.
Rhetoric and manipulation
Instead of ignoring or seeking to shut down these inconvenient intersections, it engages with them sensitively and intelligently so that rhetoric and manipulation can be identified and openly critiqued. In doing so it enables a social cohesion that is authentic, as it enables the embodiment of a variety of positions and perspectives, rather than seeking to enforce a position that is advocated for in opposition to another.
This is not to suggest that a significant amount of advocacy would not be undertaken by the active citizens or activists themselves. Rather, it is to hold up the role of the activist to scrutiny in the light of the complexity of the particular moment in history we find ourselves in, and to rethink it in terms of what is needed in our current societal context.
There are times when we need advocacy. For example, to give voice to the so-called “voiceless”, or to provide technical support that marginal and poor peoples may not be able to readily access.
However, in the complex terrain of contestation that has emerged with the digitalisation of media and communications in the 21st Century, we now require more than the simple advocacy of one position over another. We require an activism that does not seek to establish new norms simply through discursive power, but rather seeks to sow the seeds that enable an inclusive self-organisation from which new norms emerge.
This kind of activism is closer to democracy as a “culture of free expression” in that it actively seeks to foster inclusion and tolerance among the citizenry without necessarily seeking their full agreement on specific issues in a prescribed manner.
In turn, what that requires of the activist is a sense of modesty and humility in the face of the complexity of ideological orientations, socio-cultural and religious beliefs, collective experiences, memory structures – and a profound trust in the power of fostering mutual respect for differences between people in society.
This kind of activism is what is needed at the level of community if we are to build inclusive communities that can embrace difference and diversity.
Broad-based mass power
And yet, while the need for it is presented as a necessary response to the current era, it is not a new form of activism. It is the same kind of activism that builds broad-based mass power in response to oppressive and repressive regimes that exploit social divisions and differences to remain in power.
Indeed, there were strong elements of this kind of activism in the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. However, there are some key lessons we can draw from this era of broad-based representation that are cautionary.
In particular, when the focus is solely on broad-based consensus building – particularly in opposition to a readily identifiable opposing power structure – the danger of some causes being sidelined becomes a reality.
For example, the feminist movement was sidelined in the broader anti-apartheid Struggle. So was the Black Consciousness movement. Both these movements were critical to the successes of the anti-apartheid movement, but ended up trailing in its wake.
Hence, the activism of diplomacy that is being argued for here is not implying that interest-based causes are subsumed and diluted in service of broad-based representation.
Rather, it emphasises the role of activism in bridge-building, holding juxtaposing positions in play through brokering greater mutual understanding of the respective positions that people hold, while enabling and facilitating advocacy within the space of interaction.
Moreover, by engaging directly with inconvenient intersections – instead of reacting to them, reinforcing them, or simply ignoring them – rhetoric and manipulation can be stripped of its discursive power, enabling ordinary people to grapple with the complexity of diverse perspectives directly, and work through them together.
Resilient democracies
An activism that supports this more process-oriented approach is one that seeks to produce resilient democracies and societies in the long term that can sustain the social compacts that are core to its democratic functioning.
Perhaps it may be more accurate to represent the position of activist diplomacy as one that is necessary in the current era because prevailing – deep – divisions prevent interest-based advocacy from being more effective in the public realm without activist diplomacy being cultivated more deliberately and concertedly as an overarching objective.
As a popular African proverb states: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
Growing an activism of diplomacy in turn requires some fundamental shifts in how activism is conceived of, and how activist identity is constructed. An activist diplomacy is an activism of caring that extends beyond the limits where the activist finds agreement with their own personal positions and convictions.
Instead, it extends to those whom the activist may not agree with but nonetheless sees fit to engage with, while defending their right to a different perspective.
That is not to assert that the activist may not harbour a sense of what they seek to advocate for; rather, it is to foreground bridge building and the agency of ordinary people in navigating their collective and individual values and beliefs together.
It is to seek to sensitively facilitate trust building and inclusion in a process of self-organisation so that authentic consensus positions can emerge from genuine civic interaction and exchange.
In this sense, perhaps it is time for an activism of compassion and humility, one of listening more than speaking, and which engages faithfully with the benefits and vagaries of the “culture of free expression” that democratic societies must navigate in all its complexity. An activism that materially and ideologically places people first.
This is an activism that can meet the current moment, where fear and distrust of power in all its forms pervades the social and political realms in profound measure.
Simply put, an activist diplomacy is an activism that more people would trust, and for good reason. If “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” – as Archbishop Desmond Tutu warned – then perhaps it follows suit that in an era of hypervigilance we require an activism that can meet people where they’re at, instead of where activists think they should be. DM