The Cancellation of Trump

The suspension of Donald Trump from Twitter has been welcomed by many who believe that social media promotes echo chambers and disinformation. This strikes me as odd because Trump was clearly followed by people of all political persuasions, including opponents who derisively retweeted him. Short of blocking his account and muting the very mention of his name, it wasn't possible to preserve your "filter bubble" from his yawping. He sought to expand his reach rather than limit it to the select few, and I can't help wondering if he sometimes exaggerated the madness to this end. Contrary to his characterisation as a political exception, his strategy was a conventional one of both reinforcing his base and trying to attract additional supporters. He may be a racist but he was happy to welcome black and latinx voters to his camp. Similarly, his attempts at disinformation prompted broad and detailed pushback, not to mention ridicule. The actual echo chambers within which conspiracy theories are shared and plots hatched are to be found on private platforms, like WhatsApp and Telegram, not essentially public platforms like Twitter and Facebook. So why is there now a political focus on the latter?

The chief reason is that these platforms are seen as central to the public sphere, hence the conflicting demands being made of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg: you should have acted earlier to restrain Trump; you shouldn't have the power to censor public debate. It's worth noting that this has come about due to the selective recycling of content by TV and newspapers rather than because the new platforms have supplanted traditional media. This selectivity takes two main forms: the amplification of statements and actions by people who are already considered newsworthy by the traditional gatekeepers, and the holding up of the vicious and aggressive opinions of the mob for ridicule. The common thread is the maintenance of order. The concern of the traditional media is not that Twitter or Facebook failed to restrain Trump. After all, he received far greater uncritical exposure through the press and TV, while the "other ranks" of social media often highlighted his lies and evasions better than many paid commentators. The real worry is that social media has proven too democratic. It is therefore unsurprising that the the discourse has swiftly moved from the restraint of Donald Trump to the restraint of Twitter and Facebook. The critique of social media has followed three lines of attack for over a decade now.

The first is anti-trust. The obvious problem is that the value of platforms like Twitter and Facebook lies in the network effect, so a pro-competition policy cannot be pursued without destroying a leading American industry (and handing an opportunity to China). You cannot break the major social media platforms up like Standard Oil or AT&T, even if you can force Facebook to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. In reality, the now-dominant view on anti-trust, promulgated by Robert Bork in the 1970s (now more famous for being rejected by the Senate as a Supreme Court nominee in the 80s), is that monopoly is fine so long as customers benefit. As they would demonstrably lose value, a break-up simply isn't on the cards. The second critique of social media has been the perceived costs to the consumer through the loss of privacy and the associated exploitation of personal data. But as a decade of officious interventions in the form of opt-ins has shown, most users rationally consider the value of their data to be trivial and therefore an acceptable cost in exchange for the utility of social media. The third line of critique has been about the ability of social media companies to deny responsibility for hosted content on the grounds that they are platforms and not publishers. In practice, their adoption of (largely) retrospective purging of the most objectionable content is probably as far as they can realistically go. You cannot edit the Internet.

The impossibility of platform break-up and the gradual development of a safety regime focused on the disciplining of users means that the problematic of social media is less one of commercial competition than managed democracy. To date, both Twitter and Facebook have followed conventional liberal opinion by intervening to suppress or flag certain content and to suspend or bar certain individuals. Neither is particularly effective, precisely because the network effect means there's too much content to censor and the user population is too dynamic to herd, plus the risk of false positives (from malicious reporting to simple misunderstandings) is high. Ultimately, the problem of social media is democracy. While the neoreactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment are happy to acknowledge this truth, the modern inheritors of the original Enlightenment can't do so without admitting that their liberalism is founded on a bedrock of authoritarianism. The result is a continued demand for regulation in terms of publisher accountability, privacy and competition, without acknowledging that the last decade, now culminating in the bizarre spectacle of the President of the United States being suspended from the leading platforms, has shown the impracticality and irrelevance of this approach. But even if there is little practical value in it, the insistence is still politically important.

The Harvard economist Matt Stoller thinks the solution is tighter rules of the game (specifically how the platforms make their money) and robust enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission led by a new class of administrative hero. The governing ideal is that the state must not only protect the interests of the individual consumer but more broadly ensure that competition itself supports the democratic polity. This isn't a qualification of Bork but a rearticulation of the coordinating role of the state that goes back to the Freiburg School of the 1930s. If we think of neoliberalism as a broad field that lies between the poles of "the free market" and "the social market", this marks a swing towards the latter and thus the European model rather than the Anglo-Saxon. This has been echoed on cue by Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market: "These last few days have made it more obvious than ever that we cannot just stand by idly and rely on these platforms’ good will or artful interpretation of the law. We need to set the rules of the game and organize the digital space with clear rights, obligations and safeguards. We need to restore trust in the digital space. It is a matter of survival for our democracies in the 21st century." A phrase like "restore trust" should set the alarm bells ringing. I don't go on Twitter because I "trust it", whatever that means.

Michel Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), noted that 20th century "state phobia" took two forms: market liberalism and totalitarianism. Far from being in opposition to each other, they are both attempts to resist the growth of the administrative state, that melding of absolutism and incipient socialism that characterised Bismarck's Germany. Neoliberalism is the "idea of a legitimising foundation of the state on the guaranteed exercise of an economic freedom" (page 83). In contrast, "the characteristic feature of the state we call totalitarian [is] ... a limitation, a reduction, and a subordination of the autonomy of the state [to the] party" (page 190). The one limits the state horizontally (the public sphere must not transgress on the private), the other vertically (the state must serve the party). These two approaches each have many varieties, reflecting different historical contexts and cultures. For example, neoliberalism was crucial to the legitimation of the Federal Republic of Germany, producing a conservative and cautious variant (ordoliberalism) that has in turn heavily influenced the EU. In contrast, neoliberalism in the UK has been presented as progressive and dynamic, by both Conservative and Labour governments, and even provided a constructive impetus to the EU in the form of the Single European Act.

The US is different again. The structure of party politics, specifically the persistence of self-perpetuating elites (the RNC and DNC) and affiliation through voter registration, means that there is both a tight inner party and a loose, verging on chaotic, outer party. The former tends to be bureaucratic and centripetal (giving rise to the fetish of bipartisanhip), while the latter tends to attract an activist fringe that in other countries would simply be barred or purged. This encourages mavericks who can build support among the outer party, but it also leads to a persistent (and not unjustifed) populism as a response to the ingrained antagonism between the inner and outer. Historically, as the party facing the inroads of first the Populists and then the socialist left, the Democrats have tended to be the most wary of the outer party and the most committed to organising it into loyal blocs (in the tradition of Tammany Hall). The party electoral coup of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 proved beyond Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, not just because of the power of money and the DNC's machinations, but because of the crucial influence on registered supporters of key organisers such as Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

A difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the latter have, at least since Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, been more comfortable manipulating the outer party by feeding it raw meat rather than seeking to suppress its appetite. A consequence of this is that the party has increasingly melded the two forms noted by Foucault, with the intersection being state-phobia. The inner party of the rich, the superego today represented by Mitch McConnell, is neoliberal in its programme (the privileging of capital under the guise of economic freedom) but the outer party, the id represented by Donald Trump, is totalitarian in its inclination (the claimed monopoly on truth, the ostracism of "traitors", the conspiracism). The combination of the two has marginalised the pragmatic ego (which McConnell is now belatedly trying to revive). This totalitarian subordination to the party extends to petty behaviours, such as Republican members of Congress still groundlessly disputing the election results after the Capitol riot and then refusing to go through metal detectors despite heightened security. But while there are plenty happy to bandy about the term "Fascist" in respect of Trump, a narcissistic opportunist and career criminal, what this theatre of objection and refusal illustrates is that the outer party is fundamentally reactionary rather than programmatically Fascist.

While there are actual neo-Nazis among registered Republicans, and plenty among the militias who would indulge violence, the essentially negative nature of the outer party means it is closer, in the classic typology of the right, to the supporters of a Latin American military junta than the NSDAP, a point reinforced by the social background of the Capitol Hill rioters. This is the American bourgeoisie, business owners and professionals, rather than degraded peasants or disillusioned proletarians. While there are some whose backstories are the familiar tale of hard times and ressentiment, notably Ashli Babbitt, and there was no shortage of ex-service and police personnel involved on the 6th of January, this isn't the Freikorps or the Blackshirts. But does this distinction matter? I think it does because while a society can suppress outright Fascism, or at least make adherence to it so socially costly that it is driven to the fringe, as Germany and Italy did in the postwar years, you cannot remove reaction from the polity or marginalise it, simply because it is foundational to conservative thought. However repulsive its manifestations, it is a legitimate political stance and crucially one that sees itself as particularly legitimate (hence it imagines itself as the victim of a conspiracy, not a conspiracy itself). The American reactionary will not disappear, any more than Donald Trump will remain cancelled. 

The worry is that the precedent set by Twitter will (unless overturned by the courts) result in a censorship regime in which a tiny minority of users are disadvantaged, essentially to show that the market can successfully discipline democracy. The makeup of this group will be distinctive: mostly low-follower accounts falling foul of various propriety rules, sprinkled with a few high-follower, semi-crazed celebrities lacking self-control. The "politicals" will be an even smaller number, possibly no more than a handful at any one time. What will be missing is the middle-class of journalists and professional provocateurs who actually contribute the majority of the disinformation and conspiracy-mongering to public discourse. This doesn't mean that the disadvantaged public figures, whether celebrities or politicians, will disappear altogether - I'm sure the New York Times will happily publish a column by Trump, so long as it has final edit, just as Laurence Fox will never want for an outlet in the UK - but that just means that the appearance of free speech will be preserved at the cost of once more ceding control to the gatekeepers. Twitter has made a material contribution to democracy by pursuing its market interests, but it is now accepting that it must subordinate its ambitions to the interests of the true inner party - the one that encompasses both the Democrats and the Republicans: the party of order.