It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a large Twitter following, must be in want of a democracy to destabilise. This week's revelation from British cyber experts that an analysis of thousands of Donald Trump's posts reveals a deliberate pattern of democratic manipulation should not shock anyone who has spent the last decade with their eyes open. Yet the pearl-clutching across the Atlantic suggests a comfortable amnesia has set in.
We have seen this before. When the Roman Republic fell, it was not to barbarians at the gates but to the slow rot of political norms. Today, the barbarians are not Vandals but tweets: short, angry, and designed to tear down the very institutions they purport to serve.
Trump, as ever, is a symptom rather than a cause. His posts are not masterpieces of Machiavellian strategy; they are the fever dreams of a culture that has abandoned reason for rage. The British experts, bless their data-driven hearts, have quantified what any sane observer already knew: the man is a chaos agent.
But to blame him alone is to miss the point. We are all complicit. Every click, every share, every outraged response fuels the algorithm.
We have built a digital colosseum and now we are shocked to find lions on the floor. The Victorian era understood the dignity of public discourse. John Stuart Mill did not need a retweet to change the world.
He needed argument, evidence, and a society that valued truth over tribalism. We have traded that for the cheap thrill of dunking on opponents. The pattern the experts have found is not new.
It is the same pattern used by every demagogue from Caesar to McCarthy: repeat a lie until it becomes truth, attack the press, divide the people. The only difference is the speed. Trump's tweets are the telegraph of the 21st century.
They spread faster than cholera in a Victorian slum, and they are just as deadly. But let us not pretend this is an American disease. British soil is just as fertile for such populism.
Brexit was not won on reasoned debate. It was won on bus slogans and fear. The same pattern, the same decay.
These experts would do well to look in the mirror. So what is the solution? Return to the golden age of print?
Hardly. But we must recover what the Victorians knew: that liberty requires restraint. Not censorship, but a shared commitment to the idea that some things are beyond politics.
Truth, for one. Common decency, for another. Until we learn that lesson, every tweet is a small death of democracy.
The pattern is clear. The question is whether we have the spine to break it.
