For the past twenty years of my professional life as a campaigner, progressive campaigning has suffered from a serious, self-inflicted delusion. The misguided, condescending Enlightenment belief that if we simply present voters with enough facts, logic, and policy data, they will rationally reject the far-right.

This deluded, “rational” obsession has utterly failed to stem the tide of right-wing demagogues like Hanson, Farage and Trump. Failed to stop climate denialism. Failed to stop the “manosphere” and misogyny. And failed to accept how human beings actually process change fear and economic precarity.

One Nation fills the emotional vacuum left by rationalist progressive-liberal and centrist politics. Therefore, to defeat forces like One Nation in Australia or Reform in the UK, we must abandon the arrogance of “fact-checking” and the smugness behind deficit model “education and awareness” campaigns.

Instead we must build left-wing institutions that are deeply embedded in the daily life of our communities, and which conduct sustained online and real-world activities designed to build the world we want now.

Our digital strategies and tactics must not continue to exist in a vacuum of clicktivism and vanity metrics that do not measure real things changing the in the real world. We must be radically reimagine digital campaigning as a tool that builds concrete, on-the-ground organising in workplaces, neighbourhoods, and local community centres.

If we want to stop the far-right, we must stop playing defence, we must stop condescending the people we are talking to, and we must not give into the lure of “digital only” campaigning that operates like an air-war of advertising bombing raids and fundraising mass emails.

We need campaigning institutions capable of understanding psychological anxiety, and which can channel that anger away from demonising vulnerable minority targets and pointing it squarely at the corporate oligarchs and billionaires responsible for the crisis of the status quo.

For over a decade I have written about online campaigning. When I started this blog in 2008, digital campaigning and social media was new. Many believed, especially after the Arab Spring, that social media would unleash a wave of left, progressive democratic forces. That obviously did not happen.

Modern political campaigning and communication on the progressive side of Australian politics discovered click-through rates, cost-per-acquisition, and opinion polling and personas. Then some time around 2019 it stopped innovating.

In an era defined by a high-cost, high-noise media environment, the progressive side is focused on endless “testing” and optimising vanity metrics that look like “impact” but don’t change anything.

The overriding principle of your online engagement strategy will be to prompt and encourage offline action. Online support and engagement is meaningless if it does not contribute to the real-world campaign effort for your union.

The truth is, all the online campaign wizardry and tech tools in the world won’t make a difference for your campaign if you don’t have an off-line, real world impact.

Introduction to Online Campaigning, 2022

Campaigns that rely solely on demographic buckets, past turnout, petition metrics, click-through rates, and static voter or supporter CRM traits are backward-looking. They tell us who someone was, not what they are experiencing right now.

What’s more, progressive campaign messaging and communications has simultaneously become more poll-tested and more bloodless. We have had a stubborn insistence that “the facts are on our side”, and the result has alienated millions of anxious, angry Australians who should agree with us.

Decisions are emotional before they are rational, something I have consistently highlighted for over a decade. People use emotion to filter information, often only utilising facts afterwards to justify choices they have already made. This psychological reality means that relevance and emotion remains decisive in winning hearts and minds.

Unfortunately, a psychological pathology has come to define centre-left politics and campaigning. A self-destructive, pervasive, and condescending belief that progressives and small-l liberals aren’t just better informed than their political opponents, they are fundamentally smarter.

Alex Fein, a researcher at Redbridge wrote recently:

It doesn’t actually matter that Hanson is most certainly an elite these days. Reality, for now, does not matter. That is, unless other political actors get smarter about how they do things.

What is driving the excitement around One Nation has little to do with their (meagre) policy offerings. Few participants across many projects around the country even raise immigration as the key reason they like Hanson so much.

Instead, it is the carefully curated impression of Hanson as someone who would make noise. She is a “ballsy” politician who is “one of us. She is saying what no one else will say.”

This is the emotional register that institutional or polite political choices simply cannot match.

If you are campaigning against the toxic rise of right-wing populism in Australia, specifically Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, you must stop believing that presenting voters with facts and figures will break through or change their minds.

Across Australia, the working class and petty bourgeoisie are suffering under an acute crisis of neoliberalism — and their fear of being thrown into poverty is entirely valid. Pauline Hanson successfully converts this economic terror into xenophobic rage.

We cannot simply “logic” people out of positions they did not arrive at through logic. Instead, we must understand the acute emotional and the underlying material state of the Australian electorate and meet people exactly where they are feeling the pain.

Real and impactful political campaigning cannot and must not be reduced to fleeting six-week digital moments. Campaigning that has long term impact is built through sustained face-to-face collective education, not by flying in to a local region then disappearing after the polls close.

Right now, the overarching mood across the country is one of deep, intense anger, frustration, and fear. This anxiety and resentment is a rational response to the crushing weight of the neoliberal status quo.

The working class is terrified of losing their tenuous grip on financial security, haunted by the very real threat of being thrown into the ranks of the subaltern classes — the unemployed, the underemployed, and the disabled, left behind by a hollowed-out social safety net.

Meanwhile, the petit bourgeoisie — small business owners and self-employed tradespeople — are desperately fearful of proletarianisation, desperate to avoid falling down the social and economic ladder into the working class.

The “new petit bourgeoisie” are similar — highly credentialed and rich in cultural capital — are angry that the promise of getting a degree leading to financial security has been broken. These are inner suburban university educated professionals who are the new precariat. However, unlike the shop-keepers, mostly they are shifting to the Greens and Labor rather than One Nation, and it is this class that mostly staffs political campaign organisations, progressive parties and NGOs and community groups.

Demobilised

“People are mad, yes, but because of economic precarity, we lack collective agency and often retreat into a defensive position, railing against both the “higher-ups” and the “takers” below us.”

The systemic violence of capital accumulation — a real structural economic and social crisis — is the underlying contradiction that is the breeding ground for One Nation and the far-right. One Nation isn’t surging because of bad media consumption or bad media literacy that can be fixed with fact-checking or more explainer podcasts.

One Nation feeds on the fear and anger felt by stressed workers and shop keepers. They highlight neoliberalism’s failures then weaponise that anger and redirect it toward vulnerable targets: immigrants, minorities, and the marginalised. They offer a false, reactionary scapegoating based on division.

If the left wants to defeat them, we must offer a more compelling, relevant emotional alternative that is grounded in the hard material reality. As writers like Chantal Mouffe have argued, we need a strong left populism that constructs a progressive, collective, unifying identity.

We cannot leave the emotional terrain of anger and frustration to the right. Instead of trying to pacify these emotions, we must validate them and redirect them away from xenophobia and toward the structural beneficiary and designers of their misery.

This is where the marriage of left populism and modern campaigning can become really impactful.

Digital campaign strategy must advance and change to look at the mindset and emotional state of voters. When a voter is consuming media regarding the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, or housing stress, they are in a heightened state of anxiety. If we blast them with rigid, fact-based policy platforms, we create cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning and alienation. People avoid facts that do not accord with their pre-existing beliefs or worldview.

Instead, left messaging must dynamically intersect with human psychology and the material reality. We must tap into that genuine anger to build an inclusive solidarity.

We do this by defining “the people” broadly. It must include the diverse working class, struggling families, and small operators alike, without falling into non-unifying dividers of identity. And it must clearly identify the real adversary.

The enemy isn’t the migrant worker or the asylum seeker; it is the billionaire class, the corporate oligopoly CEO, and the financial elites who have engineered the crisis to enrich themselves at our expense.

By layering this contextual intelligence over our campaigning efforts, we can ensure our materially-grounded, emotional message appears when voters are feeling the acute strain of the status quo.

We can channel fear into a righteous, non-racist rejection of the system. We can offer an emotional framework that replaces isolation with solidarity, and despair with class consciousness. We can accept that workers and voters have the capacity to understand and vote in their own self interest and therefore treat them with respect.

To defeat the right, we must stop treating voters like calculators and start organising them as fellow human beings. We must reject the progressive-liberal notion that politics is not a battle between competing material interests or classes. Politics is not an administrative problem waiting to be solved by the correct application of data, science, and the expertise of the professional managerial class.

As the ITUC recently wrote, the best way to defeat the far-right is to improve the lives of working people.

Relevance beats reach, emotion drives action, and a unified struggle against the billionaire class is the only way forward.

Finally, we need sustained campaigning by institutions that are genuinely embedded in local communities. Unions, tenant unions, independent local media, which have been ruthlessly attacked and undermined, need to be rebuilt. Better market segmentation to target a voter’s real-time psychological state during an election is a bandaid over a gaping wound — it is insufficient.

We cannot defeat One Nation by renting the digital infrastructure from Silicon Valley oligarchs, and no amount of fancy in-house developed tech tools will change someone’s vote if they’re scared and angry about rent increases and cost-of-living.

We need left political institutions that can turn individual anxiety into disciplined, collective institutional power.