Ed Coper

Anyone saying the mainstream consensus can't get heard over the noise of the people saying the extreme thing.

The political actors know this.

So are we living in an era where people like Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson, Nigel Farage, are we living in an era where the times are suiting their sort of politics?

Or do they recognise how to be successful in this era?

And so they adopt the politics of being more extreme, of beating on migrants, of saying things that they know will get social media attention, legacy media attention will follow.

And then all of a sudden, all we're doing is talking about them.

Well, they've just won in the attention economy.

And the attention economy rewards the extreme, whereas our political consensus,

that beautiful feature of Australian democracy that rewards people who don't veer too far from the mainstream, that's gone out the window.

And that's very concerning because all of the things that go out the window with it are the things that we enjoy, the policies that we've reached by consensus.

Well, we can look into our crystal ball by looking at America because America is much further evolved down the path towards the full realisation of this type of politics.

Constant outrage, constant polarisation, divided to the point of civil war.

And what's the news that we see coming out of American politics every week now is some act of violence.

There was a shooter at the White House.

There was a shooter at the White House correspondence dinner.

There are now several attempts on Trump's life.

There's government violence against immigrants on the streets every day and also citizens.

And this is the logical endpoint of a system that rewards incitement on social media is to have real world violence as the conclusion.

And the academics who look at political violence can all confirm that the more heightened political rhetoric is, the more real world violence follows.

Now, what do we get on social media?