Equal and opposite effects: how liberals are working out to how to campaign in the modern age

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.