Phil Quin explains precisely how counter-productive it is to abuse people on social media simply because they don’t agree with you:
“In an era of data overload and short attention spans,” New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani writes in a superb decade’s-end wrap-up, “it’s not the most reliable, trustworthy material that goes viral – it’s the loudest voices, the angriest, most outrageous posts that get clicked and shared.” (On the upside, the sheer ugliness of #TurnArdern inspired me to undertake a Christmas detox from social media, something I’d recommend to everyone from time to time).
Given the season, I briefly wondered whether these Twitter “activists” carry over their favoured modus operandi of “dismiss, demean and disparage” to face-to-face interactions. But of course they don’t – unless they want to be shunned from any future Christmas get-togethers. Conversations have few places to go when you scream “transphobic” at your 80-year-old in-laws.
In real life, we simply don’t treat others that way, not only to avoid offence, but also because we know in our personal and family lives that people are not the sum of their most objectionable views. When I came out as gay in the 90s, it was my godmother, a fairly doctrinaire Catholic, who was first to call me, offering her love.
People almost never say face to face what they’d happily tweet or Facebook. This is one of the problems of social media as in real life you’d get a punch in the face for poor and rude behaviour. On social media, it never happens so people feel safe to say truly awful things.
You might be asking, why should we even care about the histrionics of a tiny cabal of swivel-eyed keyboard warriors? The truth is we can’t afford to look away. While it’s the case that most people have better things to do than engage in partisan online bickering, we shouldn’t ignore the outsized role social media plays in setting the tone of the discourse.
Increasingly, it drives the news cycle – and most politicians can barely take their eyes off Twitter for long enough to Google themselves. Most worryingly of all, this all serves to inspire cynicism, apathy, even disgust, among the wider public – conditions that always, always, serve the cause of the regressive politics.
Much has been written, including by me, about the troubling rise of populist Right-wing and nationalist sentiment across the West. Reactionaries are emboldened like never before, in my lifetime at least. Who knows whether the clamour they generate is the death rattle of a beleaguered elite or the roaring engines of a new and enduring conservatism? Certainly, I don’t; my once-sharpish political instincts are scrambled beyond recognition.
The rise is because, in part, the left has been out of control, trying to dramatically change people’s way of life. Like pushing a globalist agenda, forcing people to recognise numerous and ridiculous genders, pandering to the minute percentage of the population who think that they are a different sex, seeing racism everywhere, re-writing history to expunge facts and replacing them with feelz. Of course, there is also the hijacking of the climate debate to blame global warming for everything and all the world’s ills to which the only solution is socialism.
But, on the Left, casting our adversaries as stupid bigots strikes me as obviously misguided. Likewise, our tendency to lord it over others with a hyper-abundance of certainty in our superior virtue is obnoxious; our refusal to contemplate the possibility of good faith among those with whom we disagree, alienating. Liberal condescension, paired with an unforgiving approach to ideological purity, risks sending perfectly well-meaning people into the arms of our adversaries or to retreat from politics altogether.
The recently shellacked Jeremy Corbyn offered himself as a case-study in Left-wing hubris when he recently claimed Boris Johnson may have won the British election, but Labour “won the argument”. In one soundbite, he managed to convey staggering arrogance, self-delusion, insufferable smugness and, ultimately, defeatism. It’s a recipe for electoral irrelevance that too many seem eager to replicate.
I wonder if politicians like Golriz Ghahraman, who is currently carrying on as if Donald Trump has just killed Mary Poppins and not a really bad wog, will listen to what Phil Quin has to say?
Somehow I doubt it.
The one thing about social media though, is that it removes the control of the message from the very elites who have been part and parcel of the rise of nationalism because they deigned to suppress the truth or facts and instead ran their own agendas. The liberal elite and the globalists are the ones truly to blame for the rise of nationalism. I can’t see them changing though, can you?