Why are the liars winning?

Trying to understand why people insist on believing in men who will only harm them leaves us with two options; either more people than we thought are raging fascists, or the liars are somehow more appealing than those telling the truth. 

Thankfully, the number of actual fascists in the country is relatively low. Unfortunately, the number of people being Pied-Piped into fascism is growing and it all comes down to local knowledge and familiarity. 

On the council estate where I grew up, there were two schools of thought; those who saw education as the best way out of our circumstances and those who saw it as some kind of betrayal. To go to university was to see yourself as “better than”, to “forget your roots”, an attempt to make yourself into something you were not. There was a pride in being a worker, a sense that you were doing something valuable whilst the posh types only talked about it in their offices. 

The same was true of politicians. Local MPs might care about the people, but Westminster may as well have been another country, stuffed with privately-educated fools who neither knew nor cared who the working-class were. 

They didn’t look like us, they didn’t live like us and they certainly didn’t talk like us. The mistrust this bred has continued to the present day and there is still a coterie of working-class adults who (historically speaking) have never really engaged with politics.  

Social media has changed all that. As I hear from my partner, those who never watched the news are now bombarded with it on an hourly basis. Lacking the media literacy to tell spin from spam and too time-poor to read further than a headline, Farage and co’s easily accessible, “average man down the pub” soundbites are breaking through the noise.

They think Farage is not afraid to look foolish or talk like “one of the lads”. When he refers to critics of Lee Anderson as “middle-class snobs” or says that only “middle-class white people” think Ukip are racist, it resonates. 

Neither of these statements are remotely true and I doubt his commitment to “the lads” extends beyond his photo-ops, but they feed into a long-standing belief with these particular voters, that being left wing is some kind of privilege and that progressive views are the property of the middle class.  

In the US, Musk is doing the same; referring to those who work from home as the “laptop classes”, creating a deliberate divide which enables him to stand on the side of the workers. His own history with unions is seriously sketchy, but discovering that involves both a level of media literacy and an initial mistrust –  mistrust that will never develop thanks to the Mere exposure effect.

First proposed and tested in the 1960s by psychologist Robert Zajnoc, the Mere-exposure effect demonstrated that people rated familiar stimuli more favourably than unfamiliar ones. Given the choice between something we already know and something we have never been exposed to, people generally prefer the known. 

For Farage, Trump and Musk, this means producing headlines and soundbites that speak the language of the people they are appealing to, and which promote beliefs they know their audience already hold.

Other politicians may be telling the truth, but they are telling it in an unfamiliar “language”. Their calls for progress and change are jarring compared to the comfortable same-ness offered by the opposition. To vote for something which will help you in the long run, but requires a rewiring of your own belief system, is far harder than bobbing along in the same old lies simply because you recognise them. 

The mastery of both relatable lying and social media shown by Farage and co has left honest politicians (presuming any still exist) with a problem. To lower themselves to the level of snippy soundbites leaves everyone wrestling in the ideological mud. To ignore the threat they pose is to risk a far right takeover.

The only real solution is for the left to remember its roots. The energy that built the welfare state, led the miners’ strikes and the poll tax protests is still out there. The working class people who want a better, progressive country are still out there. 

If the left wants to appeal to those who have become lost in the digital fog, they need to summon up that energy and fix their social media game. The truth is still a powerful weapon, it just needs to be wielded more effectively.