A Ripping Yarn

In a piece on US public reaction to the first Covid lockdown, written in 2020, New York Times columnist David Brooks coined an apt metaphor to describe the political divide, cutting across both Left and Right: the contrast between Rippers and Weavers. The former see politics as war, and moreover a war that endows their life with meaning, while the latter seek to bring people together through consensus and compromise. The Canadian commentator Mark Bourrie adopts the metaphor and uses it to effect in ripping apart the far-right Canadian politician Pierre Poilievre in his biographical study Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. Courtesy of the Madness of Donald Trump, Poilievre lost the recent Canadian general election after having enjoyed a substantial long-running lead in the polls, not only because Canada is determined to be its own country but because the news from Washington was an unpalatable hint about what the news from Ottowa would be under a Poilievre government. Canada elected a grown-up instead; with the Australian election not long afterwards, two candles of hope were thus lit in a world where the Right – it is no conspiracy theory to say: in a colluding collaborative international push, or putsch – continues to make very disturbing gains.

Rippers exploit the real anxieties and difficulties of people to get their hands on the levers of power. Getting power is their aim, not alleviating people’s anxieties and difficulties. When people have anxieties and difficulties they need someone to blame, and the Rippers accordingly provide them with targets: immigrants, wokists, elitists, foreigners. When in power and unable to, or uninterested in, solving the problems that cause the people’s anxieties and difficulties, Rippers respond by repressing the people’s right to complain about them. If no-one is heard to complain, there’s nothing to complain about, right? Witness Trump sending in the National Guard – next, the Marines? – in California.

Among the various factors that explain the rise of the Right (my forthcoming For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy Oneworld November 2025 analyses the principal ones) is, by now familiarly, social media. Bourrie writes: ‘The anonymity of social media allows men to broadcast [their] anger. The most extreme “conservatism”, which sometimes crosses the line into a new kind of fascism – the stuff espoused by Donald Trump, the Brexiters in Britain, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and Pierre Poilievre’s cabal – arrived with Facebook and Twitter. Websites that allow anonymous publishing by angry men and foreign agents are the single most potent force in modern politics’ (op. cit., Introduction).

Yes. Anonymity is what allows social media to be a sphere of vituperation, abuse, falsehood, rage and hate. It whips up intemperances, spreads lies, allows a huge amount of harm to be done that is inversely proportional to the ease with which it is done. There is a powerful case for ending anonymity on social media. In a single stroke doing so would cull an enormous amount of the bile and untruth, the danger, that boils there with virtual impunity. Getting rid of it would thereby make the public conversation more temperate, less malign, more constructive.

The counter-argument that anonymity is required by whistle-blowers and vulnerable people is a good one, and has to be taken into account. A solution is to have dedicated and trusted addresses for anonymous messages to be sent to, the site monitors passing on responsible such messages to the press and relevant agencies. (Deciding what are ‘responsible’ such messages requires that site monitors be well-chosen, well supervised, transparent and accountable themselves). Otherwise no-one should have a social media account except under their own name. Transparency and accountability should go all the way down as well as all the way up. If one has an opinion, one should own it, take responsibility for it, and accept the consequences of what they say.

The ‘free speech’ issue is pertinent here. Right-wing defenders of free speech mean ‘speech free of consequences for the speaker’. It is obvious that there should be no prior restraint on speech; that’s censorship; but when one has spoken one should accept whatever consequences follow. I urge my students to defeat bad free speech with better free speech, thus: defeat lies with truth, defeat hate, greed and prejudice with principles. Incitement to violence, and utterances of hatred on grounds of race, sex, sexuality, age and disability, deserve condign responses: for the exercise of the right to speak, one should pay the cost if a cost is incurred. At present, the cost of ugly free speech is too often only borne by its victims.

It has become a commonplace for most inhabitants of internet spaces to appear there under a pseudonym – that includes Substack. I wonder what readers of these words will think about the adjuration to be here en clair.

But there are so many difficulties in making the internet an anonymity-free sphere. People can give false names. Although IP addresses can be traced, people can post from internet cafés out of sight of CCTV cameras. At present one individual can have multiple online identities; millions of bots are at work undermining, dividing, spreading fake news. How is all this to be countered? Suggestions please. Cyberspace needs cleaning up, because the poison flooding it and the world beyond is killing us and our societies.

Note: my future Substacks will be tagged ‘a-stream’ for commentary like the above, viz. broadly political and socio-political, and ‘z-stream’ for pieces on cultural, philosophical and historical themes. The relation between the two streams is that the latter, directly and indirectly, provides context for grappling with current issues. Context is all. Though sometimes the sheer interest of a z-stream topic (e.g. why is mathematics so amazingly apt for describing the world in physics? - forthcoming) justifies itself. Much that is worth knowing is intrinsically fascinating independently of praxis.