Читать книгу Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions - Eliane Glaser - Страница 8

We’re all familiar with the scourge of political spin. They’re all corrupt, they’re all the same, they’re all lying through their teeth. Yes Minister, The West Wing, Spin City and The Thick of It dramatise politicians’ two-faced machinations. One 2009 study found that politicians – along with estate agents – are trusted least out of all professions in Britain, behind bankers, journalists and lawyers. But what if authenticity were even scourgier? What if the politicians you really had to watch out for were the ones who rolled up their sleeves, bared their souls and spoke from the heart? What if the rotten core of contemporary politics wasn’t rhetoric, persuasion, or the copious use of spin doctors, but candour, sincerity, acting on genuine conviction? And conviction politics is what we have today. Of course, conviction is itself a product of spin – but it appears to have nothing to do with it.

I first noticed conviction politics in action on 28 March 1992, on a pedestrianised shopping street in Luton. Things were not going well for Prime Minister John Major. It was less than two weeks before the general election, and the Conservative Party were facing almost certain defeat. Major was being jostled and heckled by angry Labour voters. Suddenly, he appeared to be gripped by a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. Climbing onto a soapbox, he picked up an old-fashioned megaphone, and began to argue back. But the soapbox was not actually a soapbox at all: it was a Central Office document box, apparently tested by Special Branch to make sure it would not collapse when ‘Honest John’ stepped up onto it.

David Cameron had his own soapbox moment just before the 2010 general election. He was being heckled by apprentices at a further education college in south London. Dressed in a plain white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and – of course – no tie, Cameron seemed suited down to the ground by the apparent unruliness of the moment. ‘This is what politics should be like,’ he said. ‘This is what you are going to get from me at this election: not a script, not a lectern, not surrounded by a bunch of hand-picked people. But proper, live public meetings where actually you can argue about the future of our country and then together we can decide. Right?’ Putting his PR training to good use, Cameron spun audience hostility and his resulting wobble into the gold of authenticity. After all, in 2007, amid speculation that Gordon Brown was about to call a snap general election, Cameron had given an hour-and-a-half-long speech to the Tory party conference without autocue; a speech ‘from the heart’. ‘It might be a bit messy,’ he’d warned his audience, ‘but it will be me.’

Contemporary politics is like a shabby-chic wardrobe, or a pair of distressed jeans. It’s not that cracks don’t appear. It’s that they are recruited to the task of making the surface of modern politics even smoother. Critique is incorporated into the edgy mix. It’s Walter Wolfgang, the septuagenarian socialist peace activist ejected from the 2005 Labour Party conference for heckling Jack Straw, converted into the conference mascot. It’s Peter Mandelson turning Gordon Brown’s woodenness in front of the cameras into an asset: ‘Look, you know he’s not a sort of TV personality. He’s not sort of Terry Wogan or Des O’Connor.’ It’s Tony Blair’s sincerity over Iraq; Michelle Obama’s mirthful revelations about her husband’s dirty socks; the Tea Party town-hall meetings; Sarah Palin as hockey mom. Over the last two decades, this fake authenticity has taken over political discourse, and we have come to believe in proclamations of a new politics, people power, and grassroots revolution. I’m not saying people aren’t wise to a lot of this: the leaders’ wives’ disclosures about their husbands’ domestic habits were dubbed the ‘my imperfect hero’ strategy. And I’m not saying that all politics and all protest is the product of PR. But authenticity and political activism have become symbolic tokens which are marketed to the public, concealing deeper deception and widening imbalances of power. The next rule of ideology’s lying game is saying one thing, and doing the exact opposite. And so to the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama.

‘People power’

‘One of the reasons I ran for president,’ Obama confided in a post-election address, ‘was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington.’ And yet now Obama and big business are the chummiest of chums. If we’re all so cynical about politicians now, what was it with all the hope that surrounded Obama’s election? I mean, I know a lot of it was about the fact that he was black. But people’s faith in him as a genuine political leader contrasted sharply with the words of Obama’s former White House social secretary Desirée Rogers, who told the Wall Street Journal’s magazine, ‘We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand’ (as Naomi Klein has noted, she got rapped over the knuckles for revealing the marketing behind the image). Advertising Age was able to explain more fully: ‘Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player’ (in a lovely irony, Coca-Cola bought a 40 per cent stake in Honest Tea in 2008). That captures it perfectly: the Obama brand is both too everyday and too authentic to look like a brand. And the Obama brand is both Main Street and street-cred: both ways of suggesting he’s down with the people. When in fact he’s really down with Wall Street.

Obama’s not alone. The Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner has promised to ‘give government back to the people’. The Tea Party’s adopted style is feet-on-the-ground populism. Back on this side of the pond, Gordon Brown promised to ‘put more power where it belongs – in the people’s hands’; Nick Clegg announced that the Liberal Democrats were ‘giving power to people and communities’; and David Cameron pledged to ‘restore real people power’ through a radical redistribution of power from Westminster to ‘the man and woman in the street’. ‘We are the radicals now,’ Cameron elaborated, in one of his many variations on this Alice-in-Wonderland theme, ‘breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power, from the state to citizens, politicians to people.’ Over the last decade, British politicians on all sides have been tuning in to ‘the wisdom of crowds’: the Labour Party had their ‘Big Conversation’ in 2003; in 2009 the Conservatives launched their own internet version in the form of a £1 million competition to come up with a ‘large-scale crowdsourcing platform’. After all, explained the then shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, ‘The collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts.’

I am heartily sick of having the people power thing sold to me all the time, of being told that this is a shiny new era of engagement with voters, the open scrutiny of decision makers, the public consultation, the citizens’ assembly, the parliament for minorities and the independent public inquiry. In his book The Life and Death of Democracy, the political scientist John Keane praises these new forms of ‘deep’, ‘direct’ or ‘monitory’ democracy: ‘All these devices have the effect of potentially bringing greater humility to the established model of party-led representative government and politics.’ After the expenses crisis that engulfed British MPs in 2009, the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor declared that ‘Our constitutional future is about to be rewritten, and it will be rewritten not by the politicians but by those whose servants they are.’ But far from enhancing the democratic representation of the British people, the expenses crisis resulted in a situation where no one in their right mind would choose to become an MP, other than a millionaire or a martyr.

Remember the 2010 election campaign, that ‘thrilling’, ‘electrifying’ and ‘transformative’ contest that ‘really caught people’s imaginations’ and ‘engaged them as never before’? What seemed at the time to be a bona fide, over-to-you affair was in fact the most stage-managed and hollow campaign there’s ever been. The machinery of actual democracy was replaced by the tokens of fake democracy. The traditional morning press conference, where leaders used to be challenged on the nitty-gritty of their manifestos, was abandoned. Instead there was man-of-the-people Nick Clegg’s first-name encounters with individual voters, ‘decent’ David Cameron’s all-night communion with ‘the bakers, the brewers, the fishermen landing their catches’, and Gordon Brown’s prostration before Gillian Duffy, a pensioner from Rochdale. Everything seemed so genuine; and yet one thing was missing: actual policies. The leaders ignored several huge elephants in the living room: Afghanistan, Iraq, climate change, and exactly how they would deal with deepening financial crisis. This was an X Factor campaign in which Nick Clegg enjoyed for a time the popularity of Joe McElderry, and Mrs Duffy had her fifteen minutes of being Susan Boyle. But we were left with the least legitimate and most covertly ideological government I’ve ever seen. I don’t want authenticity or humility in politics, I just want politicians to make a case for what they want to do.

It’s a cliché of modern politics that voters have become cynical, but the reality is that we bounce between cynicism and wild optimism, neglecting all-important critique. We may dismiss Cleggmania now as a passing fad, but if we don’t understand it we won’t be able to cure our ailing politics. The key to Clegg’s precipitous rise and fall was his lack of overt ideology. Those who liked him weren’t clear what the Lib Dems actually stood for, and when his star began to fall, he had no political principles to hold on to.

A lot of the people-power hype is associated with new technology. Democracy is no longer about tedious little details like manifestos and voting. It’s about whizz-bang online engagement and getting your hands on information. As Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign manager, puts it in his book The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything: ‘The power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us.’ In 2007, American presidential hopefuls took part in a democratic ‘experiment’ hosted by CNN and YouTube. Members of the public were to submit their videoed questions via the internet for the candidates to answer live. The presenter, Anderson Cooper, was excited. ‘This is something we’ve never done before,’ he said. ‘The candidates on this stage don’t know how it is going to work … and frankly we think that’s a good thing.’ The performance exemplified modern politicians’ enthusiasm for being subjected to regular bouts of techno-charged ‘direct democracy’. The Number 10 website in the UK is an elaborate portal for e-feedback. There’s a ‘Meet the PM’ section, webchats, blogs, a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, and e-petitions. Cameron has put forward a ‘revolutionary’ project to publish the ‘business plans’ of government departments online. The White House website boasts the Open Government Initiative, promoting ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative government’. ‘The Administration is empowering the public – through greater openness and new technologies – to influence the decisions that affect their lives.’ Each US government department has its own website, with its own feedback ‘opportunities’. I am tired of all this guff, all these polling consultants and web gurus coming up with meaningless do-gooding phrases. We are drowning in it, and the reality of just how represented we are politically is being ever more obscured. The Open Government Initiative was set up by Obama’s director of communications, Daniel Pfeiffer. There it is in a nutshell, with that weasel word ‘communications’: this ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative government’ is, quite literally, PR.

Jeffrey Levy, one of the architects of ‘Government 2.0’, has described in an article on the White House website how proud he is that even negative comments get posted on the site. ‘I think you gain credibility by showing you’re willing to take some criticism … we welcome everybody’s comments,’ he said. This sign of open government is shared by the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 2009, a twenty-five-year-old maths student, Mahmoud Vahidnia, captivated the world’s media when he upbraided Khamenei in person for being an inaccessible idol that nobody was allowed to criticise. Intriguingly, however, Vahidnia’s tirade was reproduced on Khamenei’s own website, along with the cleric’s calm response. ‘Don’t think that I’ll be unhappy to hear such statements,’ he said. ‘No, I would be unhappy if such statements are not made.’ I’m not implying that the US has the same democratic deficit as Iran. But I find it interesting that the two countries share the same mock-humility bullshit. The masochism strategy is the political trope of our times.

Take the new vogue for public apologies. In February 2009, the four bankers most to blame for Britain’s financial meltdown prostrated themselves before the Treasury Select Committee. Or did they? Lord Stevenson, the former chairman of HBOS, said: ‘We are profoundly and, I think I would say, unreservedly sorry at the turn of events’ (the word ‘unreservedly’ invariably signals an underlying reservation). Andy Hornby, the former chief executive of HBOS, said he was ‘extremely sorry for the turn of events that’s brought it about’. And Fred (‘the shred’) Goodwin, the former CEO of RBS, issued an ‘unqualified apology for all of the distress that has been caused’. Caused by whom? Or rather, by what? It seems it was the ‘turn of events’ wot done it. Rather like that ubiquitous ‘I am not a racist/sexist, but I apologise if others happened to take offence’ formula, so much is said, and so little meant.

Or take David Cameron’s ‘listening exercise’ after his plans for the reorganisation of the NHS were comprehensively slammed amid talk of a supposed ‘humiliating U-turn’, or Rupert Murdoch’s pledge to make Sky News independent while bidding for full control of BSkyB, or his subsequent decision to close the News of the World. These performances of compliant submission make me think of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of subversion and containment. In an essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, the influential Renaissance literature scholar argued that far from undermining Prince Hal’s royal status, the Falstaffian revelry of his rebellious years actually consolidates it. Monarchy thrives on dissent; it needs subversion and apparent weakness to appear truly strong. Sometimes it even produces subversion – the agent provocateur. This is power as theatre, as display rather than brute force, invisible rather than real bullets. It’s power that is perfectly suited, Greenblatt notes, to an Elizabethan government with no standing army; and it’s also just the ticket for a polite, mature democracy like modern-day Britain or America. It’s an answer to the oft-repeated question of how Elizabethan plays that appear to stick two fingers up at the monarchy could be put on in an absolutist state: because they weren’t really subversive at all. Of course, not all subversion is containment: it’s more up for grabs than that. And there’s also a fair amount of brute force around, too. But the theory of subversion and containment helps to explain why modern politics is so exasperating: because all this apparent weakness is actually a form of soft power. Once you start spotting examples, you see them all over the place: at the height of the phone-hacking scandal Cameron called a press conference in which he told reporters, ‘The truth is, we’ve all been in this together.’ This seemingly blanket admission was simultaneously the exact opposite – a ploy designed to diffuse the focus of blame.

The people-power rhetoric fits right in with a broader delusion. Politicians and the public alike are colluding in a collective act of worship at the inverted altar of the underdog. This is the age of the utopian belief in Twitter and Facebook, the public adoration of ordinary heroes, fictional and semi-fictional: the Susan Boyles, Billy Elliots and Slumdog Millionaires; and Antony Gormley’s ‘democratic’ art project, One & Other, which placed 2,400 ordinary people on the pedestal of Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth. Bring on the bonfire of the vanities: those ivory-tower universities that value educational excellence, the avant-garde exhibitions that don’t cater for school parties, and the professional establishment – those doctors and lawyers who dare to follow their own codes of conduct, to exercise independent discretion, to claim specialised expertise. Down with the professional literary critic: step forward Devon-based health visitor Lynne Hatwell, courted by magazines and chat shows, whose blog champions ‘the voice of the people’.

After the financial crash none other than the former head of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that ‘Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world.’ I heard a hundred pronouncements that these ‘active participants’ would no longer tolerate the telephone-number salaries and lavish bonuses of the Square Mile and Wall Street. But those warnings are looking more and more like a containment strategy to me. Yes, there were protests against the subsequent public-spending cuts in the UK, but they were dwarfed by the large-scale uprisings in the Arab world, and also by the million-strong crowd that gathered in central London in April 2011 to celebrate Kate and Wills’ wedding. And the fascinated mixture of horror and glee with which spectacles of disorder are represented is a sign of just how rare they are. During the student protests against tuition fees in 2010, the cameramen far outnumbered the windowsmashers. The scale of the coverage served to contain the protest by overplaying its extent. The demonstrations didn’t exactly enjoy widespread public support, either. On my favourite mood-of-the-nation phone-in programme, caller after caller ticked off those ‘feral thugs’ bent on destroying private property. On the eve of the cuts’ implementation, a poll revealed that 57 per cent of the British public supported them; 29 per cent thought they should go even further. The destruction of Ireland’s economy by casino bankers hardly created a winter of discontent. The line about all sectors of society needing to ‘share the pain’ of the recession seemed to go down well enough. Blitz-spirit austerity chic was everywhere. Since we were ‘all in it together’, we had to ‘pull together’. We’d been abusing our TK Maxx storecards like there was no tomorrow, and this strong fiscal medicine would do us good. David Cameron even ‘consulted’ the public on which cuts they ‘wanted’: a performance which the SDLP MP Mark Durkan termed ‘the axe-factor’. And the City minister Lord Myners was able to get away with a Guardian article on bankers’ bonuses with the maddeningly patronising headline: ‘You are Right to be Angry’. This apparent kowtowing was a smokescreen for the reinstatement of the old global financial order.

The real outrage is that our unquestioning belief in the new grassroots revolution goes right alongside a massive reduction in the political will exercised by ordinary people. People power is a figleaf for the real power deficit. The worthy parade of the institutions of ‘monitory democracy’ is a sop to genuine accountability, a compensatory gimmick to plug the hole left by the decline of representative democracy. Focus-group politics is power-seeking dressed up as voter empowerment. Public inquiries are sham. Regulatory bodies are toothless. Complaints procedures and ombudsmen sound great on paper, but try to use them in practice and you’ll quickly find yourself in a Kafka-esque world of box-ticking and the virtual keeping up of appearances. There’s a procedure for everything, but none of them has bite. The British Parliament is increasingly a rubber-stamp exercise controlled by the whips. Parties now routinely ignore their election pledges, the most recent and most brazen culprit being the coalition government of 2010, whose long list of broken promises includes an end to ‘top-down reorganisation of the NHS’, followed by an attempt at the biggest top-down reorganisation the NHS has ever seen. The role of prime minister is becoming more and more presidential. Governments appear to lop their own limbs off in the name of small-state localism, but this just ends up consolidating elite control. Because the state doesn’t just impose power; it’s a mechanism for implementing the people’s will. Despite the displays of humility, political leaders seem to be able to get away with anything: after the débâcle of Iraq, it’s not clear what would now constitute a resignable offence. The phone-hacking scandal that flared up in 2011 revealed yet another cognitive dissonance: all the cant about modern transparency was shown to be plainly at odds with the reality of the corruption infecting a huge media empire, the police, and successive governments.

In addition to being intimidated by media tycoons, politicians are ultimately beholden not to the electorate but to the financial markets. After the announcement of massive public-sector spending cuts, an economist at BNP Paribas bank said that ‘If the austerity measures had not been delivered the markets would have gone mad.’ Everywhere, corporate and financial lobbies influence politics on an unprecedented scale: for all the talk of protecting what’s left of British industry, the government didn’t stop the sale of Cadbury to Kraft, or prevent Diageo closing the Johnnie Walker plant at Kilmarnock. And in the US, the Supreme Court has reversed a century-old ban on companies funding political campaigns, ensuring even greater corporate clout. The privatising demands of credit-ratings agencies trump Greece and Portugal’s national democracies. Just as capitalism hides the reality of powerful, deadening monopolies behind the fiction of the bustling marketplace, modern politics is the art of disguising top-down as bottom-up.

Yes, the protests across the Arab world were inspiring. But the challenge is to have real people power that lasts for more than a second. As I write this, none of the protests has gone anywhere decisive, or anywhere particularly good. For the most part that’s because of the reassertion of hard rather than soft power: of military force rather than covert ideology. But the transience of those events has also demonstrated the dangers of getting too mesmerised by the spectacle of demonstrations and Facebook campaigns, and of not concentrating on long-term overt ideological vision: on the kind of societies people want to create.

The wholesale rejection of ideological contestation has left a vacuum into which has leapt the rhetoric of people-power marketing that surrounds us today. As far as the West is concerned, politics used to be a relatively straightforward business of cause and effect. First work out what you believe in; then support a party that stands for those beliefs and will put them into action. Now that’s considered ‘tribalism’. The only hope for voters seems to lie with process and technique, with electoral reform and new media gimmicks for staging electoral contests. But changing the system is pointless without distinct options to choose from.

Because it echoes Communism, ‘people power’ sounds like a political project. But since parties are too scared to set out their stalls, it has no political meaning. We’re left with the hollowed-out post-Fukuyama tokens of Communist idealism. People power may be back in style, but there’s a curious lack of substance. Glastonbury may ape Woodstock, but we’re a world away from Black Power or the birth of Women’s Liberation. Politicians make use of the rousing connotations of Communism, but the idealism inherent in that project is gone. People power sounds left-wing, but as the Tea Party has shown, it can very easily blur into right-wing populism; just as the language of liberation can easily be recruited to the cause of free-market capitalism. In fact people power has become associated not with Communism but with its rejection: Berlin in 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests and the ‘colour revolutions’ that followed across Eastern Europe. Because people power is an empty signifier, it can be co-opted by a range of political ideologies. Political affiliation, on the other hand, has the advantage of being real.

The rhetoric of people power does in fact perform a political purpose, but it’s the opposite of what it seems. It denies and therefore preserves inequality by claiming that the masses are now in charge; and if you do not succeed in life, well, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. This is a gift to those who would like to preserve their wealth and status undisturbed. The result is a world where citizens have less and less influence, but where there’s a constant, craven and ultimately empty pandering to a symbolic populace; a world full of the false belief that everything has changed, everyone is equal, and our destiny is in our own hands. It’s a dream-like world where we are given a platform from which to speak, but the words don’t come out. I’m not sure whether we’ve become passive or just powerless. It could be that people know perfectly well what’s going on, they’re just unable to do anything about it. But what’s clear is that although a lot of left-wing ink has been spilt bemoaning the erosion of political accountability, all that outrage somehow fails to capture the surreal and paradoxical quality of the situation. It’s surreal because at the very moment our power as citizens is draining away, we’re being told that we’ve never had it so good.

Astroturf

Those who conceal their influence through fictional deferral to the public now have a handy new trick at their disposal. ‘Astroturf’ campaigns – fake grassroots movements – were developed in the nineties by tobacco firms keen to create the impression of widespread resistance to smoking bans. In 1993, the PR giant Burson-Marsteller created the National Smokers Alliance, a manufactured smokers’ rights group, on behalf of Philip Morris, the home of Marlboro. The rest of the commercial world was quick to adopt this radical alternative to traditional advertising, and the theatre of artificial activism was soon populated by a cast of ‘sock puppets’ and ‘meat puppets’: fictional personas enlisted to big up your own products, or do down the competition. Employees of Sony, L’Oréal and Walmart have all posed as puppets; and even the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, has found time to lurk pseudonymously on online messageboards.

As co-editors of PR Watch John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton describe, politicians caught on too. At a 1994 conference called ‘Shaping Public Opinion: If You Don’t Do It, Someone Else Will’, John Davies, CEO of Davies Communications and one of the earliest astroturfing experts, explained how his political letter-writing campaigns worked. ‘We handwrite it on little kitty-cat stationery if it’s an old lady. If it’s a business we take it over to be photocopied on someone’s letterhead. [We] use different stamps, different envelopes … Getting a pile of personalized letters that have a different look to them is what you want to strive for.’ Feather Larson & Synhorst, a telemarketing company which was Scott Brown’s ‘partner’ in his campaign to become Massachusetts’ senator, offers a similarly retro-authentic ‘letter desk’ service. Its website assures potential clients that ‘personal letters from constituents are proving to be increasingly effective in swaying legislators’ opinions on hot issues. FLS can economically generate hundreds or thousands of letters on your behalf … each letter is personalized, individually signed and often includes a handwritten postscript from the constituent.’

Today’s astroturfers still use snail mail when they want that grubby tang of authenticity, but the internet provides the perfect artificial ground for fake grass. A service called DomainsByProxy camouflages political and corporate identities online, and a plethora of books teach the art of building ‘bottom-up’ and ‘viral’ campaigns: from Steven Holzner’s Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business to Joel Comm and Ken Burge’s Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. ‘There are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved,’ explains an article on the website of a PR firm called the Bivings Group with the rather ominous title ‘Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World’. ‘In cases such as this, it is important to first “listen” to what is being said online … once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party.’

The fresh green lawns of political activism are being replaced by plastic grass. In 2009, the then deputy prime minister John Prescott launched an online campaign to galvanise popular protest against bankers’ bonuses. It looked like a real Robin Hood initiative, with liberal use of the phrase ‘power to the people’. Prescott himself, the archetypal Northern working-class man, gave a series of rousing, iconoclastic media interviews. But what the coverage neglected to mention was that the campaign was hosted by GoFourth.co.uk, an organisation set up with the aim of helping to return the Labour government to a fourth term in office, and run by the party’s comms chief Alastair Campbell. Prescott is a vocal fan of Twitter, and has regularly emphasised the endearing irony of himself as a former trade-union leader who can’t type but is au fait with new technology. But he has seamlessly merged his shop-floor pedigree with being down with the kids. This is highly skilled image management, not ramshackle incongruity. Prescott’s ‘Tweets’ were in fact co-written by his son David, the director of Gamechanger, a digital PR agency. From David Prescott to David Cameron to David Axelrod – Obama’s top adviser and an astroturfing supremo – PR men with an ear for the demotic have wormed their way into the heart of government.

And although America has been transfixed in recent years by the incongruous spectacle of a right-wing street-protest movement, all is not as it seems. In fact, the town-hall meetings and Tea Party demonstrations against public health insurance and climate-change legislation have been carefully orchestrated from above. Thomas Frank has described how the American Right has deliberately engineered a shift in public attitudes, so that the traditional association between Republicans and blue-blood elites has switched to liberal Democrats. The Republicans are now associated with salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk. Astroturfing gives this fairy tale a new twist. This time it’s medical insurance companies and energy firms that have been pulling the strings alongside Republican hard liners. And the theatricals are more sophisticated. The Republican candidate in the 2010 West Virginia US Senate race, right-wing businessman John Raese, presented himself as being on the side of workers, although he opposed the minimum wage. His election ads were peopled by actors pretending to be real voters. ‘We are going for a “Hicky” Blue Collar look,’ read the talent agency’s casting call. ‘These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.’ As Sourcewatch, the brilliant PR-spotting portal, has shown, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the multi-million-dollar lobbying company for the health-insurance industry, mobilised 50,000 employees to press Congress to scupper the healthcare reform bill. The town-hall meetings were coordinated by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which helped run the Tea Party protests along with the conservative organisation FreedomWorks (in 2004, the ‘single mom’ from Iowa who was a key cheerleader for George W. Bush’s plans to privatise Social Security turned out to be FreedomWorks’s Iowa state director). In Taki Oldham’s film (Astro) Turf Wars, a convener of the annual AFP ‘Defending the American Dream’ conference reports revealingly on efforts to fight healthcare reform: ‘We hit the button and we started doing the Twittering and Facebook and the phonecalls and the emails.’ A PR company called Bonner & Associates, funded by the coal industry, forged the signatures of local ethnic minority and elderly people on letters opposing a Bill to regulate greenhouse gases. Energy firms linked to the American Petroleum Institute hired an events-management company to bus in employees to ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies against climate-change legislation. Many such performances are brought to you care of Charles and David Koch, the multi-billionaire brothers who bankroll simulated bottom-up support for crony capitalism.