Living in the Lie
There is a moment in the decay of a democracy when truth stops mattering — not because people can’t tell what is true, but because they no longer care.
We have passed that point.
A growing number of our fellow citizens do not merely believe false things; they want the rest of us to act as if those false things are real. They want us to nod along, to perform agreement, to live inside their fantasy. This is not confusion. It is coercion. A demonstration of power. If they can force you to inhabit their lie, they have already won.
Why Lies Feel Better Than Reality
Button-pushing content works because it connects emotionally. It does not need to be true — it just needs to feel real. Reality is often boring, difficult, ambiguous and unflattering. It rarely makes you feel special.
Lies do.
They are exciting. They flatter the audience. They explain disappointment. They assign blame. They turn confusion into clarity and grievance into heroism. It is far easier to believe an eye-catching lie that makes you important than to navigate a world in which you are not.
This feeds particularly on loneliness. It offers belonging — to something dangerous, radical, thrilling — without requiring anything more than clicks, likes, shares, and every few years a cross in a box next to some far-right chancer.
Participation without responsibility. Identity without effort.
The Demand for Drama
These voters do not want stable, competent government. They want drama.
They want every whim indulged, every fad validated, every grievance elevated. Their ideal government behaves like Stacey and Tracey on a night out: storming off, reconciling tearfully, then starting the whole cycle again.
Competence bores them. Stability feels like betrayal. Calm looks like weakness.
Why Democracy Needs Facts
A democratic society cannot function without a broadly accepted body of facts.
The United States no longer has one. There are red-state facts and blue-state facts; Fox News facts and MSNBC facts. The Watergate scandal — which forced Richard Nixon from office — would barely register today. The right would simply deny the evidence, cheered on by its media allies.
What stands between Britain and that epistemic collapse is the BBC.
That is the real reason the authoritarian right attacks it so obsessively. Not because it is biased, but because it anchors a shared reality that cannot easily be bent to tribal loyalty.
Fear, Violence and the Fascist Script
A core chapter of the fascist playbook has always been the same: convince the public it is living in a state of existential danger and unrelenting chaos, and that survival requires surrendering individual rights to the will of the Dear Leader.
In this worldview, state violence is not just necessary — it is beautiful. The police, the military, the machinery of coercion are to be revered. Violence becomes proof of seriousness. Compassion becomes weakness. Restraint becomes treason.
This is not new. It is textbook.
The Clickbait Economy of Hate
One of the clearest expressions of this shift is the flood of far-right clickbait content, much of it originating in Asia and designed purely to drive engagement and advertising revenue.
It is astonishingly easy to fool people with it.
Alongside this comes an increase in overt hate — racial abuse, conspiracy fantasies, calls for punishment and removal — and an increase in sheer, unhinged madness.
The Reality Behind the Hysteria
Strip away the noise and the reality is far smaller than the rhetoric.
Calls for a “huge nationwide wave” of protests over the last 48 hours produced around 300 people at one locally organised protest in Nuneaton, 19 protests with attendances as low as six people in Wolverhampton, and only four events reaching 100–200 people.
This is the paradox of modern racism.
Less Racist Country, Louder Racists
Every survey and census shows Britain becoming less racist, more tolerant, more liberal and more diverse. It is diverse, liberal, well-educated communities that disproportionately pay the taxes subsidising the rest of the country.
And yet the lived experience of many of my non-white friends is the opposite — particularly online, where racism feels louder and more pervasive than ever.
The explanation is not growing racism overall, but a shrinking minority becoming louder, bolder and more extreme in its demands: deportations, exclusion, ethnic cleansing.
These views are increasingly echoed and amplified by Reform and Conservative politicians, each feeding the other.
This is a particular favourite of mine. From the English Channel to the North Sea is a very small strip of land in North Norfolk, which probably doesn’t contain many Muslims at all. So at least the author has realistic expectations.
It’s Not Just the Old or the Young
This is not just a story about pensioners or teenage boys misled by influencers.
It is my generation — Generation X — that is now powering the populist insurgency.
We have reached the years of anxiety: fear of redundancy and irrelevance, marriages under strain, the sense that the world is changing without us, that our views are outdated and someone is out to punish us for them.
Most people get through this without a political meltdown. But it has casualties — people looking for somewhere to pour bottled-up rage and disappointment that life has not delivered what was promised.
Only 19% of people in their 50s voted Reform at the last election. But a third of those aged 50–64 say they would now, according to YouGov — a staggering shift for the “Cool Britannia” generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street.
They are joined by an angrier fringe of young men convinced the system is rigged against them — that jobs, respect and romantic success are being hoarded by others.
The Fantasy They Want
They say they are sick of left and right, Labour and Tory. What they claim to want is unity — nostalgia for homogenous communities that looked after each other.
But this unity is really conformity.
It means hierarchy: men above women, white above minority, indigenous above immigrant, straight above LGBT.
Economic threats do not work. Many are retired or insulated from downturns. And in any case they want sacrifice — preferably made by others. They want to belong to something bigger, something righteous.
Their heroes are soldiers, blue-collar workers, nurses, straight men and women in traditional gender roles. They are horrified by a society that treats non-white people or LGBT citizens as equals — let alone heroes.
What they want is stability — but specifically a stability in which their social position is fixed, secure, and no longer threatened by people they regard as inherently inferior.
The Desire for Tyranny
Jean-François Revel observed after Franco’s death:
“Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny — either to exercise it themselves or, more mysteriously, to submit to it.”
Franco believed the same. What people really wanted, he said, was to see and feel themselves governed.
That desire never disappeared.
It was merely waiting for a moment when truth weakened enough for power to replace it.
Closing
The danger we face is not ignorance, but consent — consent to live inside a lie, consent to surrender judgement, consent to be governed by fantasy rather than reality.
Once people stop caring whether something is true, the ground is already prepared for authoritarianism. Facts become tribal markers. Violence becomes virtuous. Rights become conditional.
At that point, the question is no longer how tyranny arrives — only how many people will welcome it when it does.
I’m Gen X, lived through and participated in the 90’s rave scene. Its a disappointing to see those who associated themselves with Peace, Love, and Unity become brainwashed drones. Not all of us are like that, but some have changed.
The online space at the moment is terrible, and its about to get worse, by several magnitudes. AI generated video is becoming harder to spot. Already people can’t be bothered to fact check information, prefer memes and soundbites over substance. What is going to happen next year, or the year after when it isn’t memes and words anymore, but fake video footage of immigrants, Muslims, blacks and other minorities committing crimes, harassing woman and kids? It won’t matter whether its real or not, they want to believe its real, the footage would validate that and burn into their conscious.
The government can’t stop it and even if they could, the source of such material will originate from outside of the country. The social media platforms won’t do a thing to stop it – especially the likes of X who’s owner is already trying to destabilise Europe. Fake news is big, and the United States is its biggest exporter, desperately trying to drag the west into authoritarian rule.
Do we shut off the rest of the world, maybe create a UK or Europewide version of the internet as Russia, China and others do? It would be suicide for any government to do so – but if nothing is done, its game over for democracy.
Next year will see a big fight between big tech and their accomplices in the Trump regime and UK and European regulators. How that plays out will be crucial
What do you think radicalized the people who are now calling for ethnic cleansing?
Or do you think they wanted ethnic cleansing all along, but have only recently become bold enough (perhaps thanks to Trump’s second term with a now totally MAGAfied Republican Party) to say it out loud?
I think that they always wanted it. They want to live in a hierachical, whites only community. No LGBT either. The tatty flags mark out their territory.
What has changed is the language and actions of politicians like Trump and Farage which has legitimised their racism and emboldened them to take action.
I’m curious to know how those (now-)tatty flags went up so quickly: did those responsible have an owner of a bucket truck sympathetic to the cause, who could drive from one lamppost to the next to install the flags?
(It just seems to me like it would have been way too time-consuming — and risk — to individually scale each lamppost on a ladder…)
You mention Franco: it’s notable that the movement he led was perhaps the most anti-working-class movement ever to have won power in a Western country!
They didn’t just want to destroy actual socialists and communists, but wanted to wage a class war against the Spanish poor (which they saw as genetically-inferior untermenschen, much as the Nazis saw the Slavs) much as communists wanted to wage a class war against the rich.
This eugenicist attitude (strange for a movement that styled itself as devoutly Catholic, when Catholics elsewhere were in the forefront of anti-eugenics activism) was most infamously expressed by Franco’s press officer Gonzalo de Aguirez Munro:
“Sewers caused all our troubles. The masses in this country are not like your Americans, nor even like the British. They are slave stock. They are good for nothing but slaves and only when they are used as slaves are they happy. But we made the mistake of giving them modern housing in the cities where we have our factories. We put sewers in these cities, sewers which extend right down to the workers’ quarters. Not content with the work of God, we thus interfere with His Will. The result is that the slave stock increases. Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers.. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended for us. Sewers should reserved for those who deserve them, not the slave stock”
Franco’s poor block were big landowners who wanted to keep Spain in a state of neo-feudalism. The wanted obedient serfs to till the soil, and were terrified of the urban working classes. Not that different to the people backing Farage and the Powellite wing of the Tories. Also remember that Franco’s economic autarky (cf Brexit) was economically ruinous
It’s tragic that Spain between the World Wars found itself so brutally polarized between left- and right-wing extremists especially given that the political term “liberal” actually entered the English language from Spanish!
The only 100% English political term was “leveller”, while “progressive”, “patriot” and “radical” were made in England but obviously from Latin roots.
“Tory” and “Whig” were Celtic.
“Conservative”, “Socialist” and “Reactionary” were from French (plus of course the concepts of left and right in politics).
“Nationalist”, “Communist” and “Social Democrat” were German.
“Fascism” is obviously Italian, while “Populism” was a French calque of an originally Russian term.
AFAIK Brexit wasn’t sold as economic autarky (and how much of that was a product of Franco’s ideology, as opposed to his regime’s pariah status in the early post-WWII period?), and nor it does seem obvious that any political class in contemporary Britain is analogous to latifundistas in a largely agrarian country like 1930s Spain.
Although the kind of open hatred of the poor displayed by the Spanish Nationalists did have a parallel here in roughly the same time period, in the form of the English Mistery.
Brexit was sold as anything anyone wanted it to be. But once the vote was won, only the hardest most autarkic Brexit was acceptable. I always think that men demanding a hard Brexit were over compensating for something in life
And Rupert Whatsit’s new party is definitely Francoist; a posh landowner leading a party of middle class snobs who hate the people who work to pay their pensions and benefits
When I said “Brexit wasn’t sold as economic autarky” I was thinking of the “Global Britain” boosterism of Boris Johnson et al more than anything else.
Brexit was sold as anything and everything. Different leave campaigns made different promises. Some people were told that Hartlepool would start ship building. A bloke at the end of my street believed that the EU was the new Holy Roman Empire, and that’s collapse would help bring about the second coming of Jesus. Although I think that Yeats was nearer the mark
The only Brexiters I feel sorry for where the free trade supporters, who were told that Brexit meant more trade and less regulation….
You mention far-right content coming from Asia, which reminds me of a truly remarkable example I found from a Filipino YouTuber: it was a Hebrew version of the SS’s infamous Teufelslied (“Devil’s March”).
Apparently its creator is super pro-Israel, which I regard as a little strange, because if I’d heard about such a song I’d have guessed it was an anti-Israel propaganda piece designed to liken Israel to Nazi Germany!