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Other than being friends, Dan and I don’t have much in common on paper. He was born into poverty in Liverpool, left school at sixteen, joined the army, protested nukes at Greenham Common, drove taxis, raised a couple of children alone on next to nothing, and arrived at philosophy and anarchism through sheer intellect led bloody-minded curiosity.
He’s precisely the kind of intellect that Stalin would have sent to Siberia. Me on the other hand, I came from a middle-class background that turned out to be as fractured as any – a mother who resented me, an early exit from the ‘family home’ at seventeen, and a life that lurched between struggle and effort, career and occasional comfort before I eventually found my way into studying psychology as a (very) mature student. Different roads. Remarkably similar destinations.
We were talking, as we often do, about politics (a subject that both infuriates and interests us). Specifically, about something that has been gnawing at both of us for years: the sense that democracy, in its current form, is being gamed. Not broken – gamed. And that the people doing the gaming are not shy about it. The observation we kept circling was this: at some point, democratic politics shifted from persuading people to vote for something to engineering conditions in which people vote against something. Aspiration gave way to grievance. Hope gave way to fury. And fury, it turns out, is far easier to manufacture, direct, and sustain.
The Architecture of discontent
This is not accidental. The shift from aspirational to negative politics has been deliberate, systematic, and extraordinarily profitable for those who engineered it. Division sells newspapers. Alienation drives clicks. Fear keeps people tuned in. And a population that is angry, isolated, and economically precarious is a population that is incredibly susceptible to being told who to blame.
The Brexit vote of 2016 is the case study that will define this era. During the early elements of my study, I examined the relationship between right-wing media saturation and the Leave vote across different regions of the UK. The pattern was striking and, I would argue, not coincidental. In Scotland, London, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Northern Ireland (areas where right-wing press dominance was weakest, where alternative narratives had space to breathe) the vote to Leave was substantially lower. These were not necessarily wealthier or better-educated populations in the conventional sense. They were populations with access to a more varied, more sceptical and even more neutral information environment.
Liverpool’s resistance to the Murdoch press predates Hillsborough, though that catastrophe and its decades-long cover-up calcified it into something close to institutional refusal. The city’s wariness was already structural: rooted in trade unionism, Irish Catholic immigration, a port economy that bred a particular class consciousness, and a long collective memory of being treated as expendable by Westminster. Scotland carried its own version of this – decades of voting one way and being governed another had produced a lived (or should that be ‘an experienced’) understanding of democratic deficit that made grand promises about sovereignty feel rather hollow or hypocritical.
What these places had developed, almost accidentally, were cultural antibodies. Not superior intelligence. Not greater virtue. Simply the hard-won scepticism that comes from having been lied to often enough to notice the pattern.
An uncomfortable truth about intellect and susceptibility
Here is where Dan and I got uncomfortable with ourselves (and where I suspect many readers will too).
We both harbour a little resentment and we acknowledged it plainly, without pride that our often mediocre, intellectually limited representatives are elected by people who have never been required, or perhaps never had the opportunity, to think critically about power, evidence, or consequence. That is an uncomfortable thing to say. It sounds elitist. In certain company, it is the kind of remark that ends conversations.
But consider the source. Dan is not and never has been, a man of privilege. He is a man who built a serious philosophical mind out of poverty, neglect, and a life that gave him every reason to stop asking questions. The resentment we share is not contempt for the poor or the uneducated. It is contempt for a system that deliberately keeps people incurious, that weaponises ignorance, that offers grievance as a substitute for analysis and then declares the result democracy.
The research on this is not comfortable reading. Psychological studies on cognitive style, information literacy, and susceptibility to misinformation consistently find that certain thinking patterns (a preference for intuitive over analytical reasoning, lower tolerance for ambiguity, reduced engagement with counterarguments) correlate with greater vulnerability to populist and conspiratorial messaging. This is not about raw intelligence. It is about habits of mind. And habits of mind are shaped by circumstance, education, media exposure, and the degree to which your life has given you cause to question what you are told.
The villains of this story are not the people who were manipulated. They are the people who chose to manipulate them – who looked at an electorate softened by austerity, deindustrialisation, and institutional abandonment, and saw not citizens to be represented, but a resource to be harvested.
The AI Accelerant
The landscape that produced Brexit and its transatlantic cousin is now almost quaint by comparison to what is coming. Artificial intelligence has industrialised the production of disinformation. Fake news once required journalists, editors, and at least the pretence of a source. Now it requires a prompt. Deepfake videos, synthetic quotes attributed to real politicians, algorithmically personalised outrage delivered at scale. We have gone from the enlightenment and the age of rationality to the postmodernist era with Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard and now we are entering an era in which the manipulation of democratic sentiment will be cheaper, faster, and more precisely targeted than anything Murdoch or Rothermere ever managed, which might well be termed post truth.
Into this environment, we are proposing to deploy the same blunt instrument we have always used: the universal ballot. One person, one vote, regardless of whether that person has encountered seventeen AI-generated fabrications about their candidate this morning, or none.
Mill’s Question, returned with interest
This forces a question that polite democratic society would rather not ask: is universal suffrage, as currently constituted, adequate for the world we now inhabit?
John Stuart Mill (that great liberal icon) was not, in fact, a simple universalist. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), he argued for a system of plural voting in which the educated and professionally skilled would carry more electoral weight than the unskilled labourer. His reasoning was not contempt for the poor but a genuine anxiety about what uninformed mass participation might produce. He also, it should be said, supported extending the vote to women long before it was fashionable. Mill was trying to balance the democratic principle with the epistemic one. Not just who should govern, but how to ensure that governance is informed.
Before Mill, Plato had been blunter. His philosopher-kings were not a democratic conceit, they were the explicit rejection of one. The Republic’s argument is essentially that navigating a ship of state requires the same kind of expertise as navigating an actual ship, and that we do not let passengers vote on which way to turn the wheel.
More recently, the philosopher Jason Brennan has made the case for epistocracy (rule by the knowledgeable) with uncomfortable directness in Against Democracy (2016). Brennan categorises voters as hobbits (apathetic), hooligans (tribally partisan), and Vulcans (rational and informed). His argument is that hooligans, not Vulcans, dominate democratic outcomes, and that the consequences are predictably bad.
These are not comfortable positions. They have been used, historically, to justify the exclusion of women, the poor, and minorities from democratic participation – a history that cannot be wished away. Any argument that some votes should count more than others must reckon seriously with the question: who decides who is qualified? And who watches the watchers?
An unresolved question for an unresolved age
Dan and I did not resolve this. We are not sure it can be resolved, not cleanly, not without significant cost to principles that neither of us is willing to discard entirely. Universal suffrage was won through struggle and blood. It enshrines something real about human dignity and political equality that capability-based models risk destroying entirely.
But the question will not go away. In a media landscape engineered to inflame rather than inform, in an AI environment where synthetic reality is increasingly indistinguishable from real reality, in a political culture where grievance has become a more reliable mobilising force than hope, the assumption that any vote is as good as any other is looking increasingly strained.
Perhaps the honest answer is that the problem is not with the voters. It is with the conditions under which they vote. A population given genuine education in critical thinking, genuine plurality in its media diet, genuine economic security and social connection is that population that would be far harder to manipulate into voting against its own interests. The question of capability suffrage might dissolve if we were serious about creating the conditions for democratic capability in the first place.
But we are not serious about that – and the question remains
Dan, who arrived at philosophy through an army barracks and a taxi rank, understands this better than most. So does anyone else who has ever had to think their way out of a situation that was designed to keep them from thinking at all.
