The old gatekeepers have lost control of the message. The implication for politics, democracy and society is enormous

The success of Donald Trump's Maga movement shows what can happen when societal norms shift.

Let’s talk about the message, who gets to tell the story, who constructs the narrative and who frames the debate. The reason I’m ending the year with this column on who tells the story is, maybe like you, I’m trying to figure out what is happening to democratic politics. Why the anger, the spite, the bitterness, the division? Ireland has been reasonably peaceful, but as global events take time to lap up to our shores, it’s only a matter of time before the rancour and divisiveness seen elsewhere materialise here.

For a long time I was persuaded by the link between the economy and political choices. The so-called “feelgood-factor” makes sense. If people are feeling good about their life they are less likely to lurch to extremes. However, drilling down into the data on how people are voting around the world, it is clear that the reasonably well-to-do are voting regularly for extreme parties. For example, the Maga movement was originally thought to be anchored in the “left-behinds”, but not any more. It is a broad coalition of rich, poor and those in the middle – all angry and gunning for somebody, something or someplace to attack, denigrate and blame.

What appears to have changed is something called societal norms, those things that are regarded as acceptable to say in public. Once societal norms shift, things that were thought by some to be acceptable when hushed in private but unacceptable in public – such as racism, xenophobia or anti-Semitism - become reasonably widespread. In the past, although these notions were under the surface, they were suppressed. Today they are prevalent. So it is not that there has been a rise in reactionary views but that the norms that suppressed them in the past have shifted.

Why has this happened and why now?

It has changed because the message has changed. Or at least those who created the story have changed. When I was younger, there were five or maybe six messengers in Ireland – the main newspapers, political parties, RTÉ, the Church and the education system. You could take it or leave it, but it meant that Ireland had editors who – rightly or wrongly – editorialised. Today everyone is an editor. With social media, there are thousands of messengers seeking the attention of everyone, everywhere all the time.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media analyst declared “the medium is the message”. He was talking about an invention such as TV and politicians on TV in the 1950s. Whoever mastered the TV medium could craft the message. Back then there were a few mediums: print journalism, TV and radio. In the past few years, with social media, citizen journalism, podcasts and YouTube (all of which I appreciate and use), we’ve seen an explosion of platforms that people can use to spread their message, resulting in a blizzard of opinions and ideas. This has led to the splintering of audience, largely into self-reinforcing tribes who find each other online and buttress their opinion with their own silo.

This prompts people to believe that their reality is the truth. Witness the pathetic showing of the explicitly anti-immigrant candidates in the election. Once they emerged from their internet bunker, where they thought everyone thought like them, it turned out the average person wasn’t buying what they’d already sold in their chat rooms. But this process of the fragmentation of the audience and the proliferation of messengers is only beginning and who knows where it will take us.

Luckily we have an example from history that might help us analyse the revolutionary changes in society that occur when the messenger goes from the few to the many: the introduction of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1452.

The printing press wrestled the message from the church and its scribes and gave the people the wherewithal to write their own stories. In no time, the printing press electrified public debate, unleashing a thirst for knowledge. Better-informed citizens tend to be talkative citizens. The financial implications of the printing press were obvious: the general demand for books began to soar and as demand rose, prices fell. Economies of scale kicked in. Between 1450 and 1500, the price of books fell by two-thirds. In 1460, when Gutenberg printed his first bible, the price of a book amounted to about 100 days’ average wages. By 1600, a book cost less than one day’s worth of wages. Similarly today, anyone can start a blog, substack or a podcast. In the past you needed to be in RTÉ to broadcast. Now anyone can do it.

Printing changed the way we thought. Literate people could read a printed book on their own, as a solitary pursuit, and this individual study allowed for deeper reflection and analysis. As innovation tends to change the way we consume, and a revolutionary new design entered the scene: the pamphlet. A one-sided polemic that could be turned around quickly, digested swiftly and read out in the market square by a literate town crier, the pamphlet disseminated ideas to a population that was still largely illiterate. Think about X when it was called Twitter and had a limited length of 140 characters. No need to read too much, just scroll. It’s the pamphlet of the 21st century.

All around Europe, municipalities pooled resources to buy printing presses. The link between the establishment of a printing press and subsequent economic growth is unambiguous. Between 1500 and 1600, European cities with printing works established in the late 15th century grew 60 per cent faster than cities without printworks. Intellectual freedom and commercial freedom went hand in hand. Once they got a printing press, cities in Germany and other parts of Europe that had no prior industrial, trading or financial advantage experienced higher levels of economic growth and a surge in literacy. People devoured books, pamphlets and journals, displaying a clear bias for new, future-looking pursuits such as zoology, anatomy and botany. This was good news for teachers and anyone working in education. The average university professor saw his salary rise from the same as the average skilled artisan to twice that in 50 years.

The biggest change, however, was truly revolutionary – the Reformation. Martin Luther was the world’s most successful influencer, using the printing press to wage war against the Vatican. His output was prodigious. It is estimated that seven million pamphlets were printed in Germany in the period from 1517 to 1530, and more than a quarter of these were penned by Luther himself. His pamphlets were written to be read aloud, in German rather than Latin. They were usually six to eight pages long, which made them easy to digest, and easy to hide. People lapped up his message.

By the time the Vatican reacted, it was too late.

We are in a similarly diffuse world. The old gatekeepers have lost control of the message. The implication for politics, democracy and society are enormous and nobody knows where all this is taking us.