A Revolutionized Public Sphere: What Reform UK Must Learn From Trump’s America

“The public sphere is a central feature of modern society”, writes the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. “So much so”, he adds, “that even where it is in fact suppressed or manipulated it has to be faked.”

Due to the insurgent power of digital media forms, this has become a near-impossible task. However much the mandarins at the BBC and the New York Times might scramble to protect a dying consensus, fresh challengers to the established media will continue to grow unless spitefully cut off at the root. While we should not rule that out, such brazen attacks on freedom are inconsistent with trying to “fake” a public sphere. Anyone who engages in outright censorship has given up all hope that a national debate can be effectively stage-managed.

Some right-wing movements have been faster than others to catch on to the significance of the revolution enabled by digital technology. The opportunities were not lost on the strategists behind Donald Trump’s historic comeback late last year. At the urging of his Zoomer son Baron, something of a Caesar Augustus in the making, the soon-to-be 47th President of the United States made sure not only to struggle through back-and-forths with mainstream media anchors, but also to frequent the more dynamic online podcasts with much larger audiences: the comedian Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend,” the Nelk Boys’ “Full Send” show, and of course Joe Rogan’s unrivaled platform. These three recordings alone racked up over 70 million views on YouTube.

Most important of all, this enabled Trump to break the establishment media’s stranglehold on the national narrative. Although he had already done this a little through Twitter in 2016, November 5, 2024 will be remembered as the day when Trump revolutionized America’s public sphere for good.

It was the philosopher Jürgen Habermas who in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) first coined the idea of a “structural transformation of the public sphere”. This concept seeks to describe the process whereby drastic shifts in social practice, by overhauling the flow of information, can reshape the outlook of a political community. Whereas for Thomas Hobbes law arises not from truth so much as the will of a sovereign authority, Habermas points to a democratized public sphere as the enabling condition for the very opposite state of affairs: “veritas, non auctoritas, facit legem”— truth, not authority, makes law. With a proper public sphere, the hopeful idea runs – laws can then be made to reflect the deliberative efforts and gradually work out the concerns of the people required to obey them.

By way of example, Habermas refers to the dynamic, communicative culture that grew to prominence throughout Europe in the 18th century. Prior to this age of coffee houses and literary salons, he contends, the public sphere was narrower and tied to established authority. The Versailles court symbolized this top-down political culture. But the activities of the urban bourgeoisie, as they began to experiment with new social forms, created a rival culture of pamphlets, societies, and discussion salons. According to Habermas, this gave birth to a more authentic public sphere based on reason, debate, and an acute sense of shared citizenship. He concludes by arguing that this flourishing civil society, having been such a distinctive feature of the age that produced the French Revolution, was clamped down upon after the legitimist European states reasserted themselves in 1815 — an argument made more recently by Adam Zamoyski in Phantom Terror (2015).

Returning to the 21st century, one of Niall Ferguson’s central arguments in The Square and the Tower (2017) is that the internet has powered a second structural transformation of the public sphere. For most of history, says Ferguson, societies have been run by hierarchical structures, leaving the doings of distributed networks in their shadow. But technological breakthroughs, from Gutenberg’s movable type to Facebook’s BitTorrent-based release system, serve to boost these networks and catch the hierarchies off-guard. No wonder the West’s many tawdry governments are so alarmed by the free exchange of information and ideas at the even rowdier digital salons of our own time: YouTube, Facebook, and most of all X — long described by Musk as “the de facto town square”.

Decentralized social media platforms pose as much of a threat to the present regime under which we live as the printing press did to the dominance of the Catholic Church in the 16th century. As Ferguson speculates, it is likely that if Martin Luther had challenged organized Catholicism to a duel in 1417, as opposed to 1517, he would have been one burned heretic among several and only the most antiquarian specialists would have heard of him. In actual fact, Luther had a vehicle for his message because he was preaching — and crucially, writing it all down — after the invention of the Gutenberg press in the late-15th century.

The difference today is that, unlike Europe’s burgeoning 16th-century printing establishments that carried Luther’s ideas everywhere from Denmark to Switzerland, our social media barons have for the most part co-operated with the powers that be. What we have in Musk is a rogue baron who refuses to go along with the regime’s most cherished dogmas around race, gender, and sexuality, to say nothing of the politicization of science. With grinning irreverence, he provides a platform where dissidents can challenge the narratives of the governments under which they live.

Media power is everything in a mass democracy. For all his virtues as a candidate, Trump could never have triumphed without the technological means to bypass the established attack dogs in print journalism and cable news. Nobody knows this better than the corporate media itself, which has taken to squawking with impotent grief about the need to wage a legislative war on “misinformation”. Translated into less flattering but more accurate language, their mission is to “save democracy” by narrowing the range of news and opinion to which the people have access.

Despite evidence that they now find themselves in very low water, these outlets should not be ignored altogether. A non-trivial number of people, particularly in Britain and across Europe, consume little else. However, the aim of patriotic Europeans should be to weaken the cultural hegemony of these outlets — and this can only be done by tapping into, indeed honoring, the rising power of alternative media forms.

It is vital, then, that patriotic parties do not genuflect to places like Sky News or Deutsche Welle by treating them as the go-to platforms. Throughout much of last year, Reform UK’s leading spokesmen seemed more interested in appearing on mainstream programmes than they were in raising the profile of non-Ofcom regulated media, much of which is dominated and viewed by the very Zoomers whom Nigel Farage prides himself — quite rightly in many ways — on championing.

To continue the analogy with the religious quarrels of the 16th century, this is a little like Luther or Calvin trying to engage Rome’s most stubborn Cardinals in a dialogue on transubstantiation at some stacked papal council. Whatever what we make of Protestant theology, the Reformers were successful in spreading their message because they refused to regard the channels of communication most favorable to their opponents as the authoritative ones. They took advantage of the 15th-century media revolution that preceded their 16th-century theological one. Europe’s insurgent parties should likewise leverage the digital explosion of the 2010s to their political advantage this decade.

Now that Trump has so rewardingly led the way, this strategy cannot be written off as Utopian or otherwise unfeasible. As recently as the 1990s, the mere mention of “mass deportations” would have provoked pearl-clutching rebukes from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal alike. From 20 January onwards, it will be the official policy of the U.S. government. Trump’s border tsar, the no-nonsense Tom Homan, has vowed to deport ten times more illegal aliens than Eisenhower removed from the American homeland in the 1950s. Any counter-revolutionary party in Europe that fails to copy the Trumpian model for making such things happen here invalidates the reason for its existence: the desperate need for similar frame-breaking agendas in European politics.

The case for such ambition is even stronger under mass democratic arrangements. As Auron MacIntyre writes in The Total State (2024):

“If the will of the people is the key to legitimating the power of the ruling class, then the ruling class must take an interest in controlling the will of the people. The good news for our elite is that mass media provides the perfect tool for doing this.”

Thanks to a relatively unregulated online sphere, we have at our disposal much more incisive tools than the ones available to an increasingly weary, discredited mass media. These can and must be deployed against the West’s ruling elites, including their stenographers who call themselves journalists. We can thereby set the terms of political debate ourselves. As a strategy, this holds out much greater promise than the more pedestrian, subordinate role for which many populists have mistakenly settled: trying to meet public opinion where it is and then champion it over elite opinion. Real courage consists in reshaping both.

There was an opportunity to do just this before the recent costly spat between Musk and Farage over the latter’s disavowals of Tommy Robinson. When baited by journalists, the leader of Reform UK has for the most part recited the mainstream media catechism that Robinson represents some kind of first-order problem, when in fact neither his courage nor his occasional foolhardiness would be known to any of us without the countless horrors imported into our midst by a treacherous political class. “Where is the Hungarian Tommy Robinson?” is a question that I have long asked.

That should be the focus. For Farage instead to appease mainstream media narratives does nothing to restructure the public debate and with it the range of permissible opinion in Britain. The key in politics is to revolutionize the conversation in one’s favour, particularly at a time of immense cultural ferment when viral moments on social media can change everything in the space of a week. A winning media strategy in relation to Robinson could easily have been crafted.

Populism’s main weakness is a failure of ambition. By decrying elites as such, populists are too often reluctant to undertake the more audacious work of replacing them. Of course, this would mean pursuing a kind of elite standing and thus parting with the exhilarating underdog status that the term “populism” evokes. But as I have written elsewhere, populist pressure campaigns sooner or later burn themselves out, for they are more of a negative force, responding fervidly to stimuli, than a creative one. What Trump’s historic comeback, enabled by a daring media strategy, demonstrates is that the tools for a more creative approach have never been more bountiful.

When Farage poured cold water on the idea of mass deportations in a GB News interview last year, he did so on the grounds that a more affirmative answer would have provoked an outcry. Whether this is true or not, the mark of a leader is that he sets up his stall and encourages others to join the ranks. Given that Trump has now been sworn in to the world’s grandest office on a platform of mass deportations and surely boasts no greater cheerleader on this side of the Atlantic than Farage himself, the Brit can hardly claim to be opposed to Trump’s remigration plans as a matter of principle. We must conclude that Farage supports his friend’s initiative, but fears it would not fly in Britain. However, if it is necessary, as many of us believe it to be, then any leader worthy of the name will make it fly.

Allowances should be made for the fact that Reform is a new player. The party can be forgiven for navigating the game with some measure of caution at this early stage. Nevertheless, Farage should be emboldened by the counter-revolution underway in the United States. If we can revolutionize our public sphere as Trump has America’s, then any outcry from our opponents as we set about applying hitherto unthinkable remedies to restore Britain to greatness need not matter. The howls of indignation will come to seem not just impotent but worth relishing, in all charity, as a sure sign that we have won on our own terms.

Harrison Pitt is an English writer. Specializing in philosophy and intellectual history, he works as a contributing editor at The European Conservative magazine and a fellow at the New Culture Forum, where he co-hosts a weekly current affairs show called Deprogrammed.