I kept thinking about this idea last week, as I was trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin’s paranoid new essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples,” which the Russian President published on the Kremlin’s website (so, essentially, self-published). Putin fancies himself as something of a historian, and the gist of the 5000-word ramble — so poorly-composed it’s unlikely to be entirely ghost-written — is that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, cruelly separated by scheming foreign powers who want to turn Ukraine into the “anti-Russia”. Kiev, known as “the mother of Russian cities”, has been split from Moscow over the centuries by dark forces: the Tatar Mongols, the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, Austro-Hungary, the Nazis, and now “the West”, who turn the “mother” into a weapon against Moscow.

It’s rare for Putin to publish something so long, and historians, Kremlinologists and cultural critics have all been working out what it can tell us about the Russian President’s ideology and geopolitical intent. The BBC Russian service pulled together comments from eminent Russian and Ukrainian scholars, who accused the President of “school boy errors”.  Putin claims, for example, that Russians and Ukrainians are all descendants of a single medieval kingdom from Finland to Kiev that was unified by one language, one Orthodox Christian faith and one royal family. The early Kiev Kings supposedly adopted Christianity and then moved to Moscow. In Putin’s simplistic vision the identity is stable, the lineage unbroken. In fact, Medieval Rus was multilingual, has always been multi-confessional, and the descendants of Kiev kings ruled over areas outside of Moscow.

The Russian President also dismisses Ukrainian efforts (and huge sacrifices) for statehood over the centuries. The mother could not possibly be an autonomous subject. Putin claims the first Ukrainian republic of 1917 was just a German “construct.” Stalin’s enforced famine of Ukrainian peasants and slaughter of Ukrainian intelligentsia, he says, had nothing to do with the Generalissimo’s fears about Ukrainian nationalism undermining the Soviet project. Indeed, independent Ukraine, “is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era, and was to a large extent created at the expense of historical Russian lands.” Putin’s take utterly ignores the Soviet rationale for formalising a Ukrainian Soviet republic completely controlled from Moscow. It was a way to control nationalist energies.

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Sergey Radchenko, Professor of Cold War History and International Relations at Johns Hopkins University dismissed the essay as “deranged” — but frightening all the same. Rather than a serious scholarly account, its aim is to give a rationale for continued aggression. After all, if Ukraine and Russia are “one”, then invasion and other forms of colonial subjugation are just an internal matter. Putin often invokes “history” when he needs propaganda cover to send in the tanks. To justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, there’s been something disturbed about the way Kremlin propaganda has conceptualised Ukraine: either deifying it as “the mother” or castigating it as a whore who has sold itself to the West. There’s the good breast and the bad breast, and nothing in between. This latest essay, too, circles around metaphors of family relations, identity and possession; that’s why it’s so tempting to read it through the framework of psychoanalysis.

Because Ukraine isn’t just another political issue for Putin: it cuts to the quick of how he, and many of his compatriots, make sense of Russia’s sense of self. One of the tragedies of post-Soviet Russia is that its rulers have never surrendered their vision of the nation as an Empire, intrinsically destined to be a Great Power, a force around which the world revolves. And historically this identity has always been formulated via Ukraine. In the 16th century the tsars of Muscovy grandly declared their kingdom to be the “third Rome”: the inheritor of the divine mission of Rome and then Constantinople; the next city destined to unite politics and Christianity and establish God’s Empire on earth. But this claim was always based on Muscovy’s connections to Kyiv: it was the Kings of Kyiv who brought Christianity to the region, and married into the Byzantine royal family. As descendants of the Kyivan kings, Moscow’s rulers now claimed to be the epiphany of that lineage. Russia can’t quite live up to serious Empire billing if it doesn’t control cities like Odessa, Kharkov and Kyiv, the jewels of the old Russian Empire.

Internalising the idea that the “mother of Russian cities” is autonomous would mean Russia having to grow out of its self-perception as an Empire. That’s something that Putin and his clique refuse to do. Part of the protest movement against the President that swelled dramatically in 2011-12, demanded that Russia become a “normal”, modern European nation state. It called for economic and political reforms, and relations with neighbouring countries that recognised their rights as independent actors. Such a mature Russian nation would not need a tsar-like figure to rule it. Putin’s response was to stoke Imperial nostalgia and a grandiose sense of identity by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine — and to elevate himself to de facto monarch. He just can’t let go.

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By Daniel Kalder

“Growing up is realising that not everything, good and bad, revolves around you,” says the literature professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, who introduced me to Klein’s theories. Infants who receive enough care and love should start to recognise the mother as an actual person, and so enter what Klein calls the “depressive position”: “the belated perception of the mother as whole object,” to quote Cohen; “the realisation that the good and the bad breast are actually the same breast.” Ukraine is neither Madonna nor whore. “Ultimately that’s how you get to complexity and nuance and beyond facile splitting between the idealised and demonised object.”

Unable to come to terms with the complexity of the real world — unable to separate from the mother — some infants become increasingly disturbed. Putin is stuck in what Klein would call the “paranoid-schizoid” position, in which the infant becomes resentful, full of suspicion about the world, and can compensate with over-weaning ambition and sadism. The feelings towards the mother, both the obsession with and the hate towards her, can be displaced onto all sorts of things. Many people have some sort of residual resentment of such nature. The skilful propagandist will use it. Conspiratorial propaganda feeds the screaming infant inside all of us, allowing us to retreat back to before we had to grow up.

The irony is, no one has done more to alienate Ukrainians from Russia than Putin. There is a self-destructive, irrational streak in his politics. His invasion re-orientated Ukraine towards the West to a previously unimaginable extent. His need for the mother country could be the death of her. When, in his latest essay, he likens post-Soviet Ukraine to a weapon of mass destruction aimed at subverting Russia, he is laying the groundwork for a violent response. Lashing out, like holding on too tight, can’t ultimate succeed in keeping another close.

First published on 20 July, 2021

Over a century ago the director Sergey Eisenstein decreed that, sinceindividualism was horrendously bourgeois, the heroes of Communist film and theatre should be the masses. He created remarkable crowd scenes in films like The Strike, in which “the people” moved in unison like one homogenous being: a collective revolutionary energy. At the CCP’s birthday party, it was the scenes depicting the early twentieth century that notably nodded to early Soviet cinema, with relentless torrents of actors rushing from different angles across the vast stage, coalescing first into an arrow, then into a star.

Interspersed between the crowd scenes were vignettes about Chinese Communist leaders — done in the stiff, declamatory, hysterically happy style of Stalinist Socialist Realism, which replaced Eisenstein’s avant garde ideas as the USSR wore on. Mao was shown founding the CCP with grandfatherly goodwill surrounded by fiery-eyed comrades reminiscent of Petrograd’s proletariat.

After over two hours, history caught up with the present. Ballet dancers dressed in the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army pranced with machine guns, celebrating modern China’s military might. A huge screen showed videos of Xi Jinping giving speeches at the UN, in that vacant, bored way of his, like a hyper-wealthy schoolboygoing through the motions in class knowing he’ll never have to work. Every clip of the President was greeted with high-pitched squeals from the audience, of the sort associated with boy-band concerts: Stalinist cult of personality meets Instagram era energy.

The political message behind the aesthetics was ripped from Soviet propaganda, then: our system achieves success when the masses are directed by a few superior leaders in the Party. The birthday celebrations were another opportunity for CCP flunkeys to restate their favourite mantra: liberal democracy is a mess; checks and balances have degenerated into confusion and paralysis; centralised control is the way forward.

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The history of the twentieth century seems to show that this is bunk. In the Cold War, Politburo control lost heavily to the messy but more open approach of liberal democracy. But the CCP is betting that something fundamental has changed. At the climax of the birthday performance, instead of celebrating some Soviet-style Five Year Plan, a great neon blue “5G” hovered above the stage, while hologram ones and zeros drizzled down. The compere, holding a red book, celebrated how China will lead the world in the online era.

“Tech advances” the Sinologist Martin Hala explained to me, “offer an opportunity to leapfrog ahead, and at the same time to implement the “original intent” of Leninism and Maoism, mostly through facilitating centralised control that had previously been difficult to achieve.”

Centralised control was prevented by the primitive technology of the twentieth century, the theory goes, but in the age of all-knowing algorithms, AI and ever-bigger data, the force that can amass the most information and then use it to direct society wins. The CCP envisages a world of enhanced online surveillance, where all your behaviour is tracked and analysed, where the vestiges of privacy are wiped out — but which will deliver success and convenience, even satisfaction. Total digital surveillance will allow the CCP to know so much about you — much more than you can know about yourself — that it can deliver you the optimal education system; the finest health program; the most appropriate job; the safest, sleekest city; and the ideal entertainment. Even the “free” market can ultimately be controlled more effectively, the CCP argues, through centralised big data analytics about where that market needs correcting.

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Such visions of the future are accepted, whether happily or unhappily, way beyond Beijing. No less a sage than Yuval Harari believes that today’s “technology favours tyranny”. Implicit in such thinking is a concept of the human as reducible to data. Luciano Floridi, a professor of all things Internet, Ethics and Philosophy at Oxford, argues that the digital era signals a revolution in what it means to be a human. Just as the Copernican revolution made people realise we are not the centre of the universe, and the Freudian one that our thinking selves were actually impelled by our unconscious, so today we need to realise that we are just sub-sets of our own data, that our data knows more about us than we do. The Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre has suggested that our data can predict everything from our sexuality through to our real political preferences. Their studies claim that our digital footprints “are better judges of personality than friends and family”.

This thinking also pervades Silicon Valley. For the tech monopolists, more data means more profits rather than direct political control, but the underlying premise is the same as the CCP’s: we suck your data, and then feed you the “optimal” products, (fake) news, and friendships. Who needs complex freedom of choice when algorithms can decide everything for you? There’s a whole allegedly philosophical strain among the self-appointed “futurists” of Palo Alto, with their dreams of data collection enabling technology to surpass the humble human mind in what they term “singularity”: the moment that machines will think better than humans. “Singularity, Not Self,” read a big piece of somewhat CCP-style bit of corporate graffiti in Facebook’s London offices in 2019.

The internet, in short, is the interface on which familiar great questions about governance and what makes us human are playing out. The challenge China and parts of Silicon Valley are throwing down is fundamental. In a digital age, is democracy really the best system? If our data knows more about us than we do, then isn’t it best to hand decision-making to a higher power? Comparisons with the Cold War are generally unhelpful when we consider our interconnected world, but there is a battle of ideas starting to play out. As the new US administration and the leaders of “Global Britain” mumble pleasantly about reviving democracy, this is where to start.

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“Ours is a spirit that goes freely through the world and inspires others to join in the cause of defending liberty,” says the US President, though it’s frontline states like Estonia and Taiwan who are showing the likes of US and UK the way. In Taiwan, Audrey Tang — the whizz-kid activist who became Digital Minister — is the great apostle of making sure tech can favour democracy, not tyranny. The model of Silicon Valley social media is often built around grabbing your attention (and thus your data) by encouraging behaviour that is divisive and hateful — and ultimately undermining democratic discourse. Tang, in contrast, uses new platforms that strengthen deliberative debate. Pol.is, for example, is designed to foreground the commonality between people’s arguments on divisive policy issues, and then shows how they can move to consensus and create laws acceptable to the majority.

Imagine if, instead of the rancorous shit-show of our current social media, we actually had public service platforms that created the online iteration of the ancient Greek Agora. It would actually give people a stake in political decisions on everything from the local budgets through to reforming the health system, rather than letting them feel “left behind”.

Tang also argues that we should stop lumping all “data” together. There are some things, like health, where it is useful to aggregate our behaviour in order to design the most efficient interventions. Citizens can opt to hand their health data to a central institution, as long as it is then not used for any other purpose. It’s no accident that Taiwan had one of the best responses to the Covid crisis — with relentless tracking of cases, but nothing like the totalitarian measures taken inside China. But choosing to hand over health data doesn’t mean you have to hand over everything else.

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Because ultimately, autonomy matters. In Joanna Kavenna’s 2019 novel Zed, adystopian dark comedy, the future currentlyenvisaged by Silicon Valley and the CCP has arrived. Society is ruled over by tech companies who track and monitor all our behaviour, and then spit out the “ideal” lifestyles, jobs, policies and romantic partners based on predictive algorithms. But the algorithms don’t actually understand humans. The data spits out false outcomes. The romantic partners are never right. The “ideal” society makes people depressed and mad.

Every generation has to re-define what it means to be “free”, where our sense of self begins. In a digital age our individuality begins at the place where our data cannot understand us. Freedom emerges in the space between the algorithms and our actual lives. Tech can deliver many wondrous and terrible things, but it will always fall short of really knowing what makes us human.

For Ellul, that meant establishing the underlying myths that hold a society together: the American Way of Life, faith in Progress and Happiness. Everything, from conscious PR campaigns through to unconscious decisions by movie makers, connected people to these underlying myths: “Propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life.” Ellul saw the country’s over-intense insistence on its cohesive identity as a symptom of uncertainty about whether it could hold together.

“There is only one America. No Democratic Rivers. No Republican Mountains” intones a Joe Biden Presidential campaign ad, with lush shots of the American landscape. It’s a message that goes right to the anxieties that have always lingered underneath the surface in America. The backdrop of today’s Presidential election is the fear that America is disintegrating as an imagined community. Americans are alarmingly polarised: increasingly more likely to dislike and distrust people from other parties; less likely to live near them and, as a recent Pew Research poll shows, placing their trust in different partisan media environments. In response, each Presidential campaign has chosen opposing strategies for its election ads. It’s a test not so much of policies but which dynamics are stronger: the forces pulling America together, or those pushing it apart?

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“We’re the United States of America” stressed Biden in an epic ad last week, which showed a shower of images of people from all walks of life: a rainbow coalition brought together by the Democrats with Biden’s personal emotional experiences as the glue. Biden has positioned himself as someone who has experienced horrific personal loss with the death of his wife and two sons, meaning he can feel other people’s pain too. ‘We are united in our trauma’ is the message, with Donald Trump defined in absentia as the “divider in chief”, incapable of empathy. Biden’s betting big that even some possible Trump supporters are worried about the divides in American society and will vote for a candidate that stresses unity: Vote for Trump and we might lose America.

The Biden team have taken into account that, in a world where all the old Left-Right economic ideologies don’t cleanly define parties, the only thing that can bring a diverse coalition together is something more nebulous: a feeling that each can project its own agenda onto. Trump won 2016 with anger and resentment, now Biden is betting that more positive emotions can compete: “compassion” his ads say, “is on the ballot.”

The Biden campaign is also swimming with Christian motifs. In perhaps his most moving ad, one of his speeches is interlaced with Black Eyed Peas singing ‘Where is the Love’. “Father, father, father help us / Send some guidance from above,” they plead, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if they meant God or Biden. At the end of the ad we see a line from Cornel West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Then the word Love appears on a black screen, after which the word Vote appears, the Os of the two words crossing. There are echoes of the American Pledge of Allegiance: “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Ellul argued that effective propaganda has to tap into existing myths to be successful: the ad needs to resonate with a big underlying thing that people live by already. And so Biden connects his own campaign with the powerful founding story of American religious redemption, the caring father of a nation that has lost its way in the last four years, but just needs to, as another of his ads puts it, “remember who we are”.

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By Ian Birrell

Part of Donald Trump’s propaganda power has also been to connect his own story with a fundamental American myth — that of the businessman, the dealmaker. It’s a myth he has played into his whole life and cemented when he hosted The Apprentice. The sophisticated arguments from Trump critics accusing him of crypto-fascism don’t resonate with audiences who know Trump as the guy who hosts a prime time business reality show. (How can he be Hitler when he was in Home Alone 2?) And he is constantly selling Americans some great new deal he’s sealed. In recent ads on a tour of Pennsylvania he even used clips of Biden admitting that Trump’s trade deal with Canada and Mexico is “better than NAFTA”. But the salesman role is not only metaphorical. When I checked Trump social media ads with the help of NYU’s ad-tracker tool, I found people were literally using The Donald as a way to promote their own deals: something called ‘Trumprack’ was flogging Trump whisky flasks and sweaters (“a sweatshirt for the silent majority” ran the tagline).

Trump’s critics also accuse him of being a cheesy, sleazy salesman — but maybe that’s part of his appeal. He can play every embodiment of the American wheeler-dealer drama, from a gauche Great Gatsby to the door-to-door salesman down on his luck. After he came out of hospital recently there was something pathetic and desperate in the way Trump begged pensioners to vote for him. Here was Trump as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman — but one who could then, in an ad filmed the same week, fly into the White House on a helicopter to martial music in scenes with a whiff of Mussolini. The Salesman dies — and is resurrected!

But the dealmaker myth is hard to tap into when the main threat facing the nation is one that can’t be flattered or bullied into submission. No matter how artful Trump is, Covid-19 will go about its business. And so the President is left invoking divisive ‘wedge’ issues: Biden will strengthen ‘the radical Left’ and usher in riots; Trump will defend wealthy suburban lifestyles from poor people in the inner cities. The ads are right out of B-movie urban apocalypse movies, with thundering cords and burning buildings; you half expect Kurt Russell to appear.

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Trump seems to be hoping that the forces driving America apart are so strong he can further fuel them, then ride them to victory — or at least into confusion. Some fear that what might be just an ad campaign for Trump will be taken seriously by Right-wing militias. Every week I get a newsletter from The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank, about the latest online campaign in the dankest parts of the internet. Such groups are already trying to seed doubt in the results of the election if it goes against Trump and planning pitched battles in its aftermath. They are waging a vicious civil war — but for now it remains in squalid echo chambers.

Whether Trump wins this week or not, can the cohesion Ellul saw as essential to the American project ultimately survive in a media landscape broken up into such information archipelagos?  The way Trump is both reality show and buffoon yet a symptom of things genuinely disturbing makes this election, like so much with the Trump era, seem simultaneously petrifying and silly. An ad from actor Mandy Patinkin, who is running his own pro-Biden get-out-the-vote campaign, captured the tension best. It starts with a sense of impending doom and drama: “This November 3rd everything is at stake” it bellows, only for the ad to break off and cut to a discussion in the recording studio between Mandy and his wife about whether he is being too hysterical. They try to re-record the ad in a more measured tone, but keep on slipping into angst, finally screaming “It’s going to just be more fucking chaos.”

The US Congress passed an Act in 2012 that legislated for asset freezes and travel bans abroad but at the time our government was having none of it and blocked the idea: we cared only about raking in cash, morals be damned. Now that MP, Dominic Raab, is Foreign Secretary and his old initiative is being implemented: sanctions have been imposed against individuals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and North Korea. As the Government scrambles around to define ‘Global Britain’, could “defender of human rights” be part of the narrative?

In a sense this is a return to an older British image. During the Cold War the UK combined economic, cultural and political achievements to forge a greater narrative about our superior rights and freedoms: Parliamentary debates, Amnesty International, the BBC, the Beatles and the City of London were all part of one great story of ‘freedom’, in contrast to the dour state-officiated five-year plans, politburo diktat, censorship and food shortages of the USSR. In the following decades the talk of political freedoms were gradually relegated to the little leagues of foreign policy, and economic links became pre-eminent as the UK, or a few postcodes in London at least, became the capital of globalisation. Officials would sometimes mumble something about how economic integration would lead to authoritarian regimes becoming ‘more like us’ and adopting political freedoms, but if anyone ever really thought that true it now seems laughable.

Quite the opposite. When London gleefully took the money of kleptocrats and human rights abusers the cynical spin masters of the Kremlin and beyond could chortle and point. Instead of becoming ‘like us’ it showed that all that time we were just the same as them.

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If, and it’s a big if, the Magnitsky Act is implemented effectively it could signal a revival of standing up for political freedoms (or at least a little more than Brussels, which could be a motivation in and of itself). But what does it mean to speak up for human rights today? We live in a world where much of the Cold War language of ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ has been hacked, twisted and corrupted. Far-right extremists in Europe, for example, now argue they want to get rid of all Muslims from the continent to defend our ‘liberal’ traditions and women’s rights.

Or take my specialist subject: media and propaganda. It used to be easy to define a democratic information environment as opposed to a dictatorship’s: we had freedom of speech as opposed to censorship; pluralism as opposed the state’s single voice. These days it’s much harder to tell the difference. From Mexico to Manila, Moscow to DC politicians have learnt to flood the zone with so much information and disinformation people become confused, despair of telling fact from fiction.

In very different political systems cyber militias and troll farms are used to drown out dissenting voices, accusing them of being ‘fake news’ or ‘enemies of the people’, a sort of censorship through noise. And when critical journalists or opposition politicians complain of coming under attack from these online mobs, the reply from the government is cynical but crafty: ‘These online accounts are just exercising their freedom of speech! Isn’t that what democracy is all about? It’s now you, the so-called democrats, who want censorship!” And in a sense they’re right. There’s nothing in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about ‘disinformation’ being illegal; it states only that people should have the right to give and receive information.

The first regulatory proposals that democracies have come up with to deal with the deluge of disinformation is to try to pass laws to suppress what the UK Online Harms White Paper calls ‘legal but harmful speech’, a new category that includes ‘disinformation’. These proposals have appalled human rights groups: creating new, vague, and often subjective types of speech to control is exactly the sort of thing authoritarian regimes do. This is a solution that delights the Putins and Xis of this world, who are already conjuring up ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ laws that allow them to arrest anyone they care to. In trying to save democracy from disinformation, we risk boosting authoritarians.

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For the past two years I’ve been part of a transatlantic group of policymakers, academics and tech types that’s been trying to find a way of imagining what an internet in line with human rights could look like — and which different democracies could agree on. Do you really have to sacrifice freedoms to save democracy? What does freedom of speech mean in an age of bots, trolls and cyborgs?

At the start it looked like we could never find common ground: American free speech fundamentalists argued that any control on content was authoritarian; people who’ve experienced how actual authoritarians twist freedom of speech to crush any critical voices despaired. But after much debate a consensus began to emerge. We began to think about ‘disinformation’ not just as a type of content, but as a type of deceptive behaviour.

The problem with the cyber militias and troll farms is not so much individual pieces of content they post, but the way they distribute them en masse in a way that looks organic, as if it’s real citizens exercising their freedom of speech, when in reality these are hidden, coordinated campaigns from a single source.

This sort of mass, inauthentic campaign actually takes away people’s right to receive information about its origins, to understand how the information environment around them is shaped. I’m not talking about individual anonymity — that’s an important right — but the warping of reality where what seems to be one person saying something online is actually part of a network of accounts all saying the same thing, at the same time, according to lines passed down from a hidden manipulator.

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This sort of ‘viral deception’, as we began to call it, is the sort of behaviour that can be regulated against. And most importantly this is in the spirit of Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights: it’s a demand for more information, not less. As David Kaye, the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and one of the members of our group said:

“Another way to conceptualise the impact and purpose of viral deception is as a tool to interfere with the individual’s right to information. Coordinated amplification…interferes with the individual’s right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Conceived this way, it seems to me that solutions could be aimed at enhancing individual access to information rather than merely protecting against public harm.”

Ultimately, what does it mean to be a democratic citizen online? It should mean understanding who is targeting content at you and how. Which of your own data is being used to target you and why. Whether the content you see from, shall we say, a political campaign is the same content your neighbour sees. It should mean public oversight of algorithms so we understand why we see one thing online and not another.

We live in a strange paradox: on the one hand there’s more content than ever before and less censorship, even in authoritarian countries. But there is a new form of censorship: we have no idea how the information environment around us is shaped. We are like Caliban on Prospero’s island, surrounded by digital weather and weird sounds that drive us into social media swells of panics and hysterias, but which we cannot make sense of because it is all dictated from behind a cloak. This cloak needs to be ripped away. And this, of course, is the sort of transparency dictatorships don’t want: the rulers of Beijing and Moscow don’t want their citizens to know how they monitor and manipulate their data; how they rig algorithms so people see what they want them to see.

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The UK could take the lead in formulating what a democratic information environment is in the 21st century. We have already committed to making media freedom one of the aims of our foreign policy (with Amal Clooney fronting our campaign no less), but to be relevant in the media debate now you need to coordinate democracies on how to define freedom in the new digital space too.

There’s a security aspect to this also. Until we define the democratic standards of online behaviour, we can’t nail what’s so wrong with hostile states, such as Russia but also increasingly China and Iran, using covert, digital campaigns to influence our politics and interests — whether that’s to attack the Magnitsky Act, subvert the credibility of our elections or destabilise our friends in Ukraine. If we had even the simplest rules around transparency of coordinated campaigns, we would have a legal and philosophical platform to argue that Russia’s use of non-transparent bots and trolls and Facebook groups in the UK is an offence. At the moment there’s little difference in how domestic disinformation works and how foreign adversaries wage it.

But that’s always been the twist in promoting your ‘global’ image: it reverberates back home. In the Cold War the US was partly spurred on to pass civil rights legislation because its racist laws were being hammered by Soviet propaganda, undermining the US foreign policy narrative as the world’s defender of universal freedoms.

In today’s weirdly interconnected world the outer and the inner are more intertwined than ever. Dominic Raab may sit in the Foreign Office, but he’s defining the most domestic and internal of agendas.

But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Trump seems to have missed some moment of ritual repentance that American leaders are expected to perform whenever the American original sin of slavery rears its head. They may just be mantras about unity and guilt, but by not repeating them with enough conviction, Trump seems to have desecrated something essential in the American Religion. His support is bleeding. He’s even losing evangelicals.

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Trump’s relationship with Truth and Justice and Taboo has always reminded me of the final scenes in Don Giovanni (AKA Don Juan or The Trickster of Seville). Never more so than at the moment. By the end of the story, the serial seducer has run out of lies and lines. The graveyard statue of a dead judge, the Commandatore — who the Don has killed and whose grave he desecrated — comes to life and approaches with steps as steady as a death march to deliver justice. “I have come”, bellows the statue in a bass from beyond the grave, “Are you prepared?”

Over the past week, Glyndebourne has been showing online performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I found myself switching between the protests in America, with their mix of the horrifying and heart warming, and the opera, which flips between terror and farce. You never know how you are meant to feel with each new scene. And just as the protests are reaching their crescendo with the pulling down of statues, so the opera finishes with the statue leaving its plinth to take revenge on Don Giovanni.

Trump’s opponents have long wanted a Commandatore to turn up and deliver some truth and justice. One hope was Robert Mueller, of the Mueller Investigation. Remember those heroic, macho photos of the former FBI chief in military uniform that circulated around Facebook feeds? Here was the ‘real man’ who would take down Don Trump by uncovering his covert collusion with the Kremlin to seduce the American electorate.

But when he arrived, he fell apart. Watching Mueller’s Congressional testimony was painful: instead of a fearful bass, he had a high-pitched, weedy voice; his grasp of the facts was not an icy death-grip but clammy and nervous; his conclusions uncertain.

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By Tom Holland

Then came the Virus. The Virus brings death, the only thing that is ever certain: reality becomes undeniable at the point of our obliteration. But Trump even tried to find a way to avoid that reality. His supporters questioned the numbers of those killed by the Virus: even these cold, hard facts, they claimed, are ambiguous. It’s an ambiguity amplified by the fractured American media landscape, where there’s one, demonic Donald Trump on CNN and MSNBC, and another, heroic one, on FOX, and a myriad more on social media.

Here, too, Trump mirrors the Don. There are some who see the operatic Don as a sociopath who uses the excuse of ‘freedom’ to run amok, manipulating his victims by first promising them the instant gratification of all their desires, and especially those of poor peasant wenches, then heartlessly tossing them aside to satisfy his own. He invites guests to his Mar a Lago-like palace, where he sings toasts to ‘freedom’ while planning to take a bride’s virginity, just for the sake, it seems, of getting one over on her groom. He is obsessed not so much with love, but with the numbers he has seduced; his eroticism is quantative, not qualitiative. In the ‘catalogue aria’ his servant Laporello produces a black book where he lists the women his master has seduced (640 in Italy, 1003 in Spain!), adding that:

“He seduces the old ones
For the pleasure of adding to the list”

Trump is just as obsessed with ratings and retweets (and boasts of the women he has bedded), but with no attention paid to the quality of that engagement.

But there are others who see the Don in a different light. He is a rebel, standing up to smug elites and a hypocritical establishment. In a 2010 essay on Mozart’s opera, the libertarian author John Kerns weighs up the two interpretations. Kerns initially “conceived of Don Giovanni as a (libertarian) hero… standing up against the church, against convention, against rigid social class…The Don is an operatic archetype representing the appetitive life force, and he is an emblem of liberty and independence of thought.”

Having analysed the Don’s crimes, Kerns does reconsider: “Is he a hero? He is not. His behaviour is so flawed by narcissism, irresponsibility, and dishonesty that he simply fails to qualify.”

Likewise, some of the libertarians who first lauded Trump’s rebellious role have now become deeply disillusioned. But for so many other of his supporters, the President remains a hero, exploding through the limitations of the po-faced establishment. Even his style — his ostentatious, gold-plated, baroque bathrooms with their overspill of ornamentation — challenges order and prim propriety, bursting out from constraint.

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Ambiguity is amplified in Don Giovanni by the fact that there are so many different versions of the ending. The original 1630 tale, the Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina, was very much a morality tale, about how a “society that depends on conscience has no defense against a sociopath who has none”. In this tradition the Don, when confronted with the Commandatore, goes down humiliated, begging for mercy.

But in other versions of the story Don Giovanni is more defiant: when the Commandatore tells him to repent, he refuses to renounce his own behaviour. There are even different versions of the opera: the original Mozart one had a chorus at the end delivering the moral of the story; Romantic reinterpretations in the nineteenth century cut the moralising ending. There is a CNN Don Giovanni and a Fox Don Giovanni, just as there is a Breitbart Trump and an MSNBC Trump.

Don Giovanni is a metaphor not only for Trump, though, but also for how chaotic our media and our perception of the truth have become. Throughout the opera the characters are constantly switching identities, pulling on masks and pretending to be someone else, just as in our political life old identities don’t seem to make sense anymore: what on earth is a ‘conservative’ these days, or ‘the West’.

Trump’s talent, and it is a sort of talent, has been to fill that void. His is a world of simple but brutally effective binaries. As old identities are undermined he bundles together disparate anxieties and instincts into ‘Real Americans’ — ‘the people’ who are frustrated in their desires by a conspiracy of the Establishment, the Elite, The Commandatore. Complex clusters of debate are reduced to ‘Fake News’ or ‘Hoax’. Even the way Trump is constantly giving his detractors nicknames (Sleepy Joe and Little Marco) reduces complexity to easily managed signs. He is attractive to his supporters precisely because he can represent a coherent, almost child-like world view. For someone who doesn’t make sense he has so far been effective at generating meaning. He denies facts, but conjurs a way of seeing the world many have found seductive.

In their attempts to compete with Trump, and Trumpian politicians generally, opponents have resorted to two strategies. One is to associate themselves with the desires and frustrations of ‘the people’ even more ardently Trump. This has been the approach of ‘Left-populists’. The problem is that to be effective as a strategy populism has to be agnostic about being ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, it just adopts any seduction that works for any voter. We struggle to find political metaphors for election-winning populists like Trump because they can be libertarians to one audience while showering subsidies on another; embrace a Jewish Modern Orthodox son-in-law while peddling anti-semitic tropes about George Soros. A real populist sleeps with everyone. The Don even dresses in his servants’ clothes when he thinks a more humble look will pull a maid.

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The other strategy has been to take the side of order, the status quo, against Trump — to play the Commandatore to his Don Giovanni. The problem with this is that you are still playing inside the metaphor set up by Trump. You might win one election that way, but you haven’t dealt with the whole logic of thinking. The status quo marks the space in which a Don can flourish. As Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Soviet literary critic, argued in his analysis of Pushkin’s short play about the last days of Don Giovanni, The Stone Guest, Don Giovanni and the Commandatore are actually two sides of the same character, two interrelated poles. And that means Trump can just as easily become the Commandatore too — as he is trying desperately to be now by defining himself as the President of Law and Order standing up to the Mob.

In order to truly undermine Trump, one has to undermine the structure of his metaphors, the seductive binaries through which he has built his world. We are seeing glimmers of this in the protests. Amid their chaos we see inspiring moments where the the divides between police and protesters are broken, spontaneous moments of dialogue, where the opposition between the ‘crowd’ and ‘the establishment’, is dissolved into a greater vision of a more complex public.

Trump’s metaphors are helpless in the face of a communication that jettisons the very structure of his binary thinking. His metaphors, such as blaming all the protests on a plot by Antifa, are for the moment flailing. He can’t embrace the language of reconciliation because his whole world view is based on division. Trump loses when the whole logic of pitching Don Giovanni as the opposite of the Commandatore disappears. It’s a resolution ingrained in the last scene of the story. As the Commandatore grasps the Don’s hand, the floor gives way beneath them, both are pulled together into hell — and the stage is left empty.