All those nineteenth-century anti-democrats’ warnings about the evils of ‘mob rule’ – see https://bernardjporter.com/2019/03/31/the-mob/ – seem to be coming to roost now, in the new guise of ‘populism’. There can be little doubt that ignorance and stupidity are two of the elements that fuel political discourse currently, on all sides, of course, but most noticeably and dangerously (I would say) on the Right. We’ve witnessed several example of literal ‘mobs’ in the US and the UK recently (Washington 2021, British cities 2024); all of them expressing typical Right-wing complaints, and many of them coloured by far-Right conspiracy theories. It’s not necessarily their fault, of course, but a response to real – but ignored – grievances and concerns, boosted and manipulated by both the millionaire-owned mainstream media and, now, the billionaire-owned ‘social’ sort.

There are general questions to be asked over whether foreign-based multi-millionaires of any political persuasion (and they are likely to be Rightist, because they’re rich) ought to have so much influence over any country’s domestic politics. There are also questions to be asked about the veracity of the information they put out: how we can tell whether it’s true or reliable, or untrue enough to be discouraged or even censored by the ‘fact-checkers’ who used to be employed to establish the reliability of posts on blogsites, until Musk and Zuckerberg came along. Is it only a ‘freedom of speech’ issue, as those two chappies maintain? And – more philosophically – what is truth? One doesn’t have to go all the way down the ‘postmodern’ burrow, or adhere to Kellyanne Conway’s 2017 line on ‘alternative facts’, to think that Trump’s claim that the USA’s alliance with Italy goes back to the days of the Roman Empire, or Musk’s description of Labour minister Jess Phillips as a ‘rape genocide apologist’ (and there’s more where that comes from), were anything but grotesque lies: stupid in the first case, malevolent in the second. True or untrue, the fact that these views have millions of dollars projecting them on to the internet, whereas the rest of us only have a single comment or vote each (or at best a newspaper article) to disagree with them, can’t be healthy for a democratic politics.

Quite apart from their distribution, where do these views – in general terms – come from? I think I glimpsed a clue when I once lived in the USA, and heard this comment on a night-time phone-in radio programme. (I’ve quoted it before, possibly more than once, but think it’s worth repeating.) The topic for discussion was the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. The host brought up the issue of the London Blitz. A phoner-in justified that by claiming it was ‘in retaliation’ for the Dresden bombing. The problem with this, of course is that the Blitz came four years before Dresden. When this was pointed out to the speaker, his reply was I think revealing: ‘I’m a free American and can believe whatever I like.’ Could that be the mind-set that lies behind Trump’s and Musk’s dangerous howlers?

Or it may be simply the amoralism that seems to be endemic in Right-wing politics these days: the idea that in a flawed political world what persuades is more important than what is true. Especially if it can be trumpeted over and over again, by those whose views can be amplified – in the present case by social media – and to people who rely on headlines and slogans, and have not been educated to discriminate between propaganda and likely truth. Surveys of the educational attainments of each of the sides in recent national debates in Britain and the USA indicate that the ‘populist’ Right is relatively unschooled by comparison with ‘progressives’. Which is why ‘populists’ demean schooling so much – ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ (Michael Gove) – and put them in the ‘élitist’ category that is the common target of most of them.

Which of course raises the hackles of the populists even more, and is a further obstacle to a politics of a more considered and rational kind. Listen to any phone-in programme today and you will find stupidity in abundance. Dare to say it, however, and you’re immediately dismissed as one of those liberal, wokeish ‘elitists’. It’s depressing.

Solutions? Electoral reform. A ban on rich people having too much influence on the internet. Dissociate yourself from the most outlandish ‘woke’ ideas. An educational system that prioritises thinking over everything else.  And perhaps take Musk off his anti-depressants. (What are the side-effects of ketamine?)