Date: 2025-04-05 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016927
UK Politics
Bellicose Insurgents
All hail the hyperleaders – the bellicose insurgents using the web to seize control ... Boris Johnson longs to be one of the new breed of politicians, backed by an online ‘superbase’. But he is falling short
Peter Burgess
Boris Johnson
Opinion ... All hail the hyperleaders – the bellicose insurgents using the web to seize control
Boris Johnson longs to be one of the new breed of politicians, backed by an online ‘superbase’. But he is falling short
Boris Johnson at a hustings event in Manchester, 29 June 2019 ‘Everything about him signifies the possibly terminal crisis of the Tory party.’ Photograph: Andrew Yates/Reuters
Back in the far-off days of Occupy and the Arab spring, we were told that the political future would be leaderless, “horizontal” – and defined by the egalitarian promise of social networks. But more than ever, any chance of political success now depends on charismatic, one-person leadership, and the crucial online currency of celebrity.
On the left, this is the age of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On the right are Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini and the other figureheads of reactionary populism, whose most grimly fascinating example is probably Narendra Modi of India. All of these individuals present themselves as people from outside their countries’ establishments, and draw their energy from vast numbers of devoted supporters who gather online. In his own way, Boris Johnson clearly fancies his chances of becoming one of them. But more of that in a moment.
Their names are ‘repeated in social media and turned into hashtags, all of which becomes a rallying point for militancy'
Paolo Gerbaudo
For the past two weeks I have been immersed in a brilliant book published late last year: The Digital Party, by the London-based academic Paolo Gerbaudo, much of which is an analysis of the new political methods pioneered by the Italian Five Star movement, co-founded by the former comedian Beppe Grillo.
Gerbaudo uses the term “hyperleadership” to describe a central feature of 21st-century politics, and portrays how it works in terms of a few elements. One is the sense that people’s bond with the new kind of leader is “charged with feelings of empathy and affection”. Another is the way that leaders’ images are “celebrated in thousands of memes, serious and joking”. Their names, he says, are “repeated incessantly in social media exchanges and turned into hashtags, all of which becomes a sort of symbolic rallying point for digital militancy”.
Superficially, this might suggest a mere update of the kind of qualities seen in no end of politicians down the years. But hyperleadership represents something new, in so much as it is rooted online and based around a set of clearly identifiable and often very modern things: to quote Gerbaudo again, “an immaculate history of political engagement which gives the leader an impression of authenticity, ingenuity and honesty”, and “a down to earth attitude”, whereby the leader avoids complex language and presents themselves “as a common individual living like ordinary people do”. Obviously, not every hyperleader precisely reflects this template – Trump, for instance, affects to be something like a “common individual” in his mode of communication, but certainly doesn’t live like one. But by and large, the characterisation rings true, in plenty of countries.
Leader of Spain’s Podemos Pablo Iglesias ... Pablo Iglesias, the charismatic, media-savvy leader of Spain’s Podemos party . Photograph: Curto de la Torre/AFP/Getty Images Hyperleadership usually works in conjunction with what Gerbaudo calls a superbase. Not that long ago, the mass membership party was said to be dead. Now, thanks to the internet, huge numbers of people swarm around the most successful political leaders. These people need not be massively active: a few clicked “likes” a day and regular social media posts often suffice. Crucially, whereas anyone with a formal political affiliation was once left in a world of near silence, given only the occasional newsletter and leaflet, such people now form large and self-contained informational systems, built around both the online output of individual leaders and party machines, and an abundance of partisan media outlets. If you want your politics vivid, highly charged and straightforward enough to be expressed in 280 characters, being part of a superbase built around a hyperleader will be just the job. Now, some of this may well be for the good. As evidenced by Corbynism and the US’s new democratic socialists, it can definitely make politics insurgent and exciting, and rip things away from the control of vested interests – particularly when it comes to the media. The combination of hyperleaders and superbases also makes sizeable advances possible in super-quick time (something potentially suited to the climate emergency, among other issues). Those two things powered the rapid rise of the Spanish party Podemos, whose thinkers originated the concept of hyperleadership and put it into practice in the charismatic, media-savvy form of Pablo Iglesias. A comparable formula also explains why Corbyn performed so well at the 2017 election, and why Ocasio-Cortez’s branding as “AOC” and the righteous, modern, green politics she represents have so jangled the nerves of the Democratic establishment. But starting with the fact that all the current hyperleaders in national leadership positions are men – clearly, old-school alpha males are a big part of this story – there are also reasons to worry. A superbase exists outside the usual forums of representative democracy, and to some extent defines itself against them. It is usually sustained by passionate support for a hyperleader and collective loathing of traditional politics and the media. As a result, anything perceived as an attack on a hyperleader will be maligned as being entirely motivated by base politics, and therefore instantly dismissed. Thus every new verbal and behavioural outrage perpetrated by Trump is picked apart in the press and on TV while his supporters go into defiant raptures. The Labour party is accused, with plenty of justification, of having a deep antisemitism problem, but the issue has not, and will not be, taken terribly seriously by many Corbyn supporters. Few political stories in fact now seem to have any lasting traction, partly because our online discourse ensures that politics and the media exist in a constant state of distraction, but also thanks to the way in which hyperleaders and superbases ensure that far too many things are reduced to a narrative of one noble individual versus their adversaries. Though Johnson is presumably no more familiar with the term than he is with the realities of building models of buses, he clearly wants to be a hyperleader. In retrospect, his decades-long cultivation of an affectedly bumbling personal style, his self-consciously outrageous pronouncements and his ubiquity on television were part of the preparation, something confirmed by his opportunistic leadership of the great hurricane of reaction and fury that was the leave campaign. Over the past few weeks the spectacle of a would-be prime minister refusing to engage with the most basic kinds of scrutiny and accountability has looked like hyperleadership in its most cynical and abject form. But Johnson fails all the important tests. There is no Tory superbase. He cannot claim to be from outside the political establishment, nor to have doggedly stuck to the same beliefs for the whole of his career. He hardly speaks like an ordinary person, or lives in any way like one. In response to the controversy about what happened at his girlfriend’s flat, Johnson did not act like the “British Trump” of media legend and belligerently use the internet to try to change the conversation but responded to his mauling by the traditional media by sitting for a run of fairly disastrous traditional media interviews. In other words, he is hopeless even at the games he thinks he is playing. Rather than embodying the cutting-edge of politics, everything about him signifies the possibly terminal crisis of the Conservative party: a hidebound, utterly orthodox political institution that is foundering in the face of modernity. This may sound like good news. But if Toryism sooner or later goes under, something else will replace it. Though the form a remodelled British right will take will obviously depend on how – or whether – Britain’s exit from the EU happens, it seems to me that this is exactly where the Brexit party might be heading, thanks to the digital expertise it has copied from the Five Star movement. Note its burgeoning superbase, the hyperleadership provided by that charismatic chancer Nigel Farage – and the fact that it has been out-polling the party Johnson wants to lead. Such is another sign of a new political order, here and across the world, and things that the dwindling defenders of the old political mainstream still barely understand. • John Harris is a Guardian columnist The Five Star experiment has failed us. Now Italy needs real political change Francesco Grillo Read more