All that is solid melts into posts: an interview with Will Stancil

In recent years, the American researcher (and committed social media poster) Will Stancil has emerged as one of the most prominent and vociferous critics of materialist theories of politics, and of the idea that centre-left governments can expect to win re-election on the basis of economic delivery.

With many centre-left leaders (including Keir Starmer) still seeming to bet the house on ‘deliverism’, Renewal co-editors Morgan Jones and David Klemperer spoke to Will about Joe Biden’s failure, the dangers of deliverist strategies, and politics in a social media age.

(The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

 Morgan Jones:

You are best known as a commentator on American politics. So I’ll start by asking you about how you understand the Biden presidency – its economic successes, its political failures, and how it all fed into the second Trump term.

 Will Stancil:

A lot of what got me thinking about politics in my current fashion was seeing the reaction to the Biden presidency. The standard conventional wisdom when Biden was coming into office was that if he succeeded on policy – and particularly if the economy was good – then he would be popular, but that if the economy was bad, then he would be unpopular. People liked to quote Clinton’s line from back in the 90s – ‘it’s the economy, stupid’.

But I think what we saw with Biden is that just didn't really pan out. He entered office, and the economy was pretty much good from the day he started. It was a continuation of Trump's economy, plus it was powering out of the COVID slump. There was a lot of job growth, very low joblessness rates, a lot of growth, a lot of income growth – and real income growth – especially at the lower end of the income spectrum. Basically, all these things that if you told someone about in advance, would lead them to say ‘great, Biden's probably super popular’. But instead, what we saw is that he was remarkably unpopular – about as unpopular as any president in my lifetime was, and sometimes more unpopular than Donald Trump.

It just didn't add up. So what a lot of people did is they went and found what I would describe as ‘loopholes’ in the economic situation, in order to explain it. The big one was inflation. Obviously, there was some inflation. But it wasn’t super severe! It was moderate - it wasn't out of control. There were also things like housing costs. Some people also talked about gas prices and grocery prices. People talked about, you know, real disposable income. People pulled these metrics out, went deep into the numbers in order to pull something out and say ‘well, this tracks, so this is what's this is what's causing it’.

But I think a better explanation is that this whole model, this whole way of thinking about politics where people react mechanistically to what's happening in the economy, is just wrong. This isn't how people actually approach politics. It's not how they decide whether they like a candidate. It's not how they decide what they believe.

 David Klemperer:

That brings us on to our next question very nicely, which is: what is your model of how politics works?

 Will Stancil:

So this isn’t like a mathematical model. But what I would say is that politics really starts with people, and with people’s psychology. It all starts in our head – what we think, what we believe, how we feel about the world. Individually everything flows down from that – all my political decisions, all my political beliefs, all my political behaviours. And then at the large scale, society is just made up of individuals for whom that is universally true.

So you have to ask: what is going on in people's heads and making them believe, feel and think the way they're thinking? Some of that might be the economy, might be what's happening with their income, their job situation, and all that. But I think the larger share of that is usually their social environment – the media they're consuming, the information they're hearing. I think that that has been the primary driver of political changes and political trends in our current era.

 Morgan Jones:

So would you say this was a turn away from understanding politics in a materialist sense, and instead approaching it from a more psychological perspective?

 Will Stancil:

Yes. There have been a lot of debates about what it means to understand politics in a material sense, but if we mean that people are reacting mechanically to structural economic conditions around them, I find that very hard to square with what we're seeing in real elections and real political trends. I think the trends we are seeing are a lot easier to explain if you think about them in terms of group psychology, mass psychology, and the inputs into that. So for instance, I think that one of the primary things we've seen – although many people are in denial about this – is the immense effect of social media on politics. Not because it's changing how people live materially, but because it's changing how they perceive the world.

 David Klemperer:

So to follow up on some of those points: to what extent do you think this psychological explanation of politics was always the case? And to what extent do you think this is just about the internet era?

 Will Stancil:

So I think this has always been the case, to some extent. If you think about a flow chart of what makes people act the way they act, I don't see how you could remove people's psychology from that flow chart in any era. Ultimately, like I said, everything flows out of our heads.

I think what has made it stand out more in the internet era is that you have seen a fragmentation of the information sources that people have access to compared to even a few decades ago. So previously, for instance, what would happen, more or less, is, let's say you have a president who produces a strong economy or a recession. Well, you have a handful of newspapers, a handful of TV channels, and they all say there's a strong economic recession, so that's kind of what everyone believes. It becomes a consensus belief. And so people are reacting in some way – albeit in a mediated way – to reality. But today, there’s not that mediation. So if you have a president who's a Republican, but all the Republicans are reading sources saying the economy is wonderful, and all the Democrats are reading and sources saying it's terrible, there isn’t that consensus belief.

Look at Joe Biden’s presidency: all the Republicans were reading sources saying the economy was terrible, while the Democrats were mostly reading sources saying the economy was good. Although I think we can see that it wasn’t quite symmetric - a lot of the Democrats were also reading that the economy was terrible in the Biden era. So the point is that with this fragmentation of information sources, these effects become much more attenuated from what I would describe as the reality on the ground.

 David Klemperer:

Historically, it's generally been the case that the left understands politics in material terms, and the right is more interested in things like crowd psychology. You’ve previously said that there is something of an analogy between your understanding of politics and that of someone like Christopher Rufo. So I'd be interested in your how you see your analysis in relation to those of the contemporary left and right.

 Will Stancil:

I think the right is essentially correct about this. I think the left has better policy ideas (I would describe myself as being centre-left, left-progressive). But I think that the left has an unhelpful tradition of thinking about this for a couple different reasons.

First off, there's a Marxist tradition that really inclines people on the radical left to want to see politics as reflecting some sort of underlying structural economic factors, particularly economic class and the experiences of different economic classes and the relation of people to capital and that sort of thing.

I also think there is a temperamental tendency on the centre-left to want to look at things in economic terms – less because they're ideologically descended from the Marxist tradition (although there is some of that), but more because it feels more serious, more rigid, more empirical. Instead of saying ‘how do people feel’, you're asking ‘what was the net job growth this quarter’.  And I think for people who are highly educated and spend a lot of time studying economic policy, they want to think about the world this way.

But I think that in essence they are simplifying out the irreducible psychological factor. And one of the insights that the right has had – maybe inadvertently, as I think some of this is more instinctive for them than intellectualized – is that the psychological component is really what drives people. And if you really bear down on that, you can achieve a lot of policy change, and a lot of electoral success.

 Morgan Jones:

What does this mean for the role of policy in achieving political change? Does this mean that politics in your view is just a matter of psychological manipulation and psychological narrative building, or can you actually change political outcomes at all with good policy?

 Will Stancil:

You know, I don't know. I think that's an open question right now. I would say I would feel pretty pessimistic right now about our ability to achieve good election outcomes with good policy. I think that, in fact, it's a little bit of a trap for liberals or progressives or the left to think that we can.

I hear this over and over – the idea that you can get into office, do good things, and then have people support you. But it just keeps on not working out that way. And I'm concerned that this idea becomes an excuse to not worry about the politics side of politics.

My view is that you should do good things if you have power, but that policy is not ultimately driving election outcomes. So you may as well do stuff that's good, but there's no substitute for going out there and winning hearts and minds.

 Morgan Jones:

So what do you think this means for how left wing parties should campaign, communicate and govern? Here in the UK at the moment we have a Labour government taking a fairly hard ‘deliverist’ approach – ‘we will improve things, we will get waiting lists down, and then people will vote for us in four years’.

 Will Stancil:

I would fully expect that to fail, to be honest. I think that what you have to do is to persuade people that you are the better party. Failing that, you need to persuade people that you are the party that everyone else sees as the better party.

One of the things that has happened here in the United States, and that I think is really striking, is the way that the Democratic Party has come to be seen as embarrassing. It's cringe to be a Democrat, and especially to be a mainstream Democrat – if you're a Democrat, you’ve got to at least be a Bernie kind of guy. And I don’t think that necessarily comes from anything Democrats have done policy wise. In fact, Biden was pretty successful in office in terms of policy objectives.

If you look at some of the causes that more left-wing, progressive people claim to care about, Biden was fairly successful in pursuing them. Cancelling student debt was a hobby horse for a lot of people, and Biden actually cancelled quite a lot of it. The reality is, his unpopularity wasn't about what he had done. It was about the fact that people complained about him public, so that support for him became like wearing the wrong brand on the playground. It came to be seen as a marker of being uncool, and the result was that many people abandoned the party.

I think you see this particularly strongly among young people, who tend to be a lot less informed about policy specifics, but a lot more immersed in constant media streams, and a lot more exposed to the opinions of peers. Young people have also traditionally always been a lot more malleable in response to the consensus of their peers. And you saw that beyond general opinions of Biden – and this was actually one of the things I started shouting about in 2021 – young people's opinions of Biden were dismal, and they just got worse and worse. It was worse than I've ever seen for Democrats, and it was striking because Democrats traditionally do pretty well among young people.

Young people's opinion of Trump when he was elected was actually net positive by like five points or something, which is incredible for a Republican – and especially given Trump was not really popular in his first term. But now, as the social media consensus has shifted against Trump, he’s back to I think negative 40 among young people.

None of this is really coming out of policy. It's not like Trump has changed his policy or his policy agenda. It's not like Biden changed his policies. What has happened is just this shifting sense of, like, who's cool, who's in, who's out. You know, you look around at your friends and you say, ‘Who do my friends like? I like them too’. And it leads to these kinds of swings.

I think that one of the problems that you're seeing, frankly, with the Labour Party in the UK, is that it comes off as critically lame. I hate to say it, but there’s no sense of it being something that you would be particularly proud to support. And I don’t know how you restore that. I don't think there's a magic formula for it, but I think that has to be the goal.

 Morgan Jones:

So when you say that to win in this in this environment, ‘you just have to be the better party’, is ‘better’ just cooler and more popular and better liked?

 Will Stancil:

Yeah – or being seen to be those things.

One of the things that social media does, and that I think is really striking, is shape our perception of other people’s opinions.

Frankly, based on my experience, I suspect that most people’s political opinions are essentially the same as what they perceive their friends political opinions to be. If they see all their friends believe in something, or think that all their friends believe in something, they’ll likely believe it too. That’s why so much political discussion centres on this idea of ‘well everyone is saying it’ or ‘everyone knows it’.

I think that one of the things that social media does is that it gives us an inaccurate sense of what the consensus opinion is, while giving us a perception that we know what the consensus is. I can go on Twitter and see 1000 posts from 1000 people. And human beings are very in tune – it’s just part of our social wiring! We like to, you know, vibe out what the consensus view is on this, that, or the other. And social media creates these sorts of artificial social consensuses that really help drive opinion.

TikTok is particularly effective at this, because the way TikTok is structured using it just feeling like your peers talking to you – like some random person just picked up the camera to do a funny little chat. And they say ‘oh Joe Biden, I can’t believe he did this and this and this’. And you’re like, wow, it seems like regular people just like me really hate him. So I should probably hate him too.

How do you restore your position after that? There’s not a formula for this. There’s almost an X-factor quality to it - are you cool? Are you uncool? How do you how do you become cool? How do you achieve that sort of positive reputation, that celebrity?

 David Klemperer:

Traditionally, people would think it was a great political advantage to be the incumbent, because that lets you define the political dynamic and set the agenda through policy. In your view, is there any advantage to being the incumbent anymore?

 Will Stancil:

I think potentially! Because these things are so malleable I can certainly conceive of a scenario, for instance during Covid, where leaders could present themselves and protecting people from a disaster. I think in 2024 Donald Trump possibly benefited from not being the incumbent, but from having previously been in office, so that there was a sense of ‘oh, well we can got back to when things were good’. So I don't think there's a strict penalty that's always going to attach to being incumbent, but certainly it does make you an easier target for people to complain about, and that's always going to be an uphill battle.

 David Klemperer:

So I thought we might move on to some of the arguments you've made about the specific dynamics of the internet. One argument you've made is that the dynamics of social media are specifically beneficial to the far right, the radical right. I wonder if you could explain that?

 Will Stancil:

In a traditional media environment, there's a publisher. The publisher publishes something. You have your local paper, your local TV channel, and you turn it on, or you grab the paper, and you read what's on there. You don't have any options. You get what you are given.

In a social media environment, there’s much less cost to publishing material, video, text – whatever you can put out on the internet. Suddenly, there's this plethora of voices out there. There's tons of tons of blogs, tons of cool newspapers, tons of videos, Tiktok, all of this. And on social media just an infinite number of events that you can follow from every different perspective. And this creates a market for attention where the audience gets to select the sources they are going to listen to.

What we've discovered, in a sense, is that people naturally gravitate towards sources that validate what they already believe. Things that encourage them to feel very strongly about beliefs they think very deeply. Those can be positive or inspiring things, but they can also be negative things: be afraid of this, be scared of that, be angry about this.

One of the things that's interesting about this, and that's a real problem, is that in this very open publishing environment, there isn't any real friction against publishing things that are false or untrue. Traditional media has a lot of checks that would at least cause friction. If you just publish outright falsehoods you might get sued for defamation. Beyond that, you have editorial policies, you have many people working on a TV story or on traditional print articles, many people who might make a fuss. But in a social media environment there is usually just one person, and they can just say literally whatever comes into their mind. And unless it’s really egregious, its probably not going to matter whether it’s true or not.

So what you have is competition amongst many publishers – amongst this giant, almost infinite collection of low cost writers and video publishers all competing for attention. And they are experimenting to find which statements, which assertions, which claims are going to attract the most attention. And what we’ve seen over time is this kind of arms race towards the most dramatic, the most emotionally loaded claims possible. Just go on social media and you’ll see this. There will be people saying ‘crisis! crisis! crisis!’ or ‘look at this inspiring thing’ or ‘look at these cute puppies’ or whatever. Every single thing you see is designed to force some sort of emotional response from you. People have gotten really good at this, and what we’ve seen over time is that the stuff that tends to spread the furthest tends to be the more negative stuff – ‘be fearful’, ‘be angry’, ‘be resentful’.

What, I think we've seen also is that the right has access to a deeper pool of negative emotions, because they can tap into a lot of really deep-seated resentments and bigotries – particularly around race, gender, and immigration – that are just not accessible to anyone who can calls themselves a member of the left or centre left. And that really advantages them. They can just dig in on this fully – and they have dug in on this fully, more and more over time. Whereas the left is trying to stay away from those topics, and sticking to ones that potentially have a lower ceiling. 

 David Klemperer:

Do you believe it would be possible for the left to find a way of channelling anger and resentment against the rich, against the elite, or something like that. Do you think that a left populism of that kind would have some potential? Or do you see that as a dead end?

 Will Stancil:

I think it does have some potential. I think we've seen it has potential. And we’ve seen it quite a lot in fact. As we’ve entered this sort of fragmented social media information environment, we’ve seen both the rise of far-right populism based around race and gender and immigration, and then far-left populism based around class resentment, and to some extent conspiracism – you know ‘distrust the police’, ‘distrust institutions’. So there’s certainly some potential there.

I think that the problem is firstly that paranoid, angry, resentful populism is inherently corrosive, and that it’s not a very good or stable political formation on which to build anything progressive, because it eats itself very quickly. The other issue is that I just don't think it hits hard. My background is in civil rights and I’ve studied the racial history of the United States for a long time. I think these group-identity fault lines are really deep, and that racial tension goes a lot deeper than resentment based on class. It’s just very entrenched in our political DNA, and in the DNA of most countries with our kind of political past.  

So I don't think left populism is a particularly productive pathway. I think you can get some headway with it, but that its ultimately kind of a dead end, and that what you get out of it can be unstable. So I think we are much better off trying to find a way to diffuse the right-wing version of populism than trying to match it with one of our own.

 David Klemperer:

So what you're essentially saying is that the left can't win on fear and resentment. It can only win on hope and solidarity. But unfortunately, our current information space is entirely geared towards fear and resentment.

 Will Stancil:

Yes, I think so. But I also think there are some very potent emotions that progressives can play on, that aren’t necessarily about class warfare. One of the things that’s potentially really potent here in the United States, especially given some of the stuff that Trump is doing, is patriotism.

I think we have pretty proud traditions that if Trump is attacking, we can mobilise in defence of. It’s notable that since the right has been exploring the outer limits of online populism, it is no longer sense a conservative political movement – I mean the most radical voices here in the United States are far-right voices! And because they are so radical, I think that we could almost fall back on an appeal to traditional ways of doing things, to a kind of small c conservatism that is about protecting our institutions, and protecting our Constitution. We on the left can now talk about protecting our democracy in a kind of way that has traditionally been the province of conservatives.

 David Klemperer:

I wonder if you could also say something about specific dynamics of Musk’s Twitter, and how you see the impact of Musk’s takeover of Twitter?

 Will Stancil:

So I think that the Twitter takeover was probably the most overlooked political event of the last five years. I was screaming about it at the time, and I was really scared about where it would go. Unfortunately, it's been worse than I expected.

Like I said earlier, people's political views tend to reflect what they perceive the consensus as being. And unfortunately, Twitter, although it is not widely used – most people are not on Twitter, especially now – is widely in use amongst people who are very politically connected. All journalists are (or at least were) on Twitter. All politicians were on Twitter, many still are.

Musk has made a number of pretty dramatic changes. The largest, frankly, was just unbanning and allowing very radical white supremacist neo-Nazi types to exist on there, completely unrestricted. He also changed it so that people who subscribe to Twitter, which is disproportionately those people, are prioritized for comments and views, and prioritized on people’s feeds.

What this has done is that it has created a social environment (and I do think it makes sense to think of social media as a social environment) in which it looks, if you glance around the room so to speak, like everyone is somewhere between being hard right and being a neo-Nazi. And you can directly see how this has exercised a really powerful pull on the political thinking of a lot of influential people. Ideas, even words, that would never have been in common currency before are just everywhere.

One example I think about – and it might be a small thing, but it is I think telling – is the word ‘retarded’. Frankly, this was (rightfully!) something you would not say in polite company a few years ago, but it has become commonplace even on the left. And the reason why is that Musk has created a social environment which this is just a common term that you might insult someone with, so it's just crept into the vocabularies of people really ought to know better. And its because the social environment around them has dramatically shifted. And while people think they would be immune to that, that they would notice or respond, they absolutely get influenced by it.

While it’s a little harder to demonstrate, I think you can also see the same thing with a lot of ideas about race and about gender, or with how people talk about immigration using language that a couple of years ago would have rightly felt horrifying. So Musk’s Twitter is just exercising this really dramatically rightwards pull on the entire political class, which then filters down into the rest of the political system.

 David Klemperer:

What you're saying about the dynamics of Twitter exercising that kind of influence on people without them even realizing it rings so true here in the UK as well. I’m in group chats where half of the people in the group chat are still on Twitter and half aren’t, and the divergence that has resulted between those people's politics is just so striking.

 Will Stancil:

You can see this here. Amongst liberals in the US, there is a very clear divergence between people who stay on Twitter and use that as their primary social media outlet, and people who have moved to Bluesky. I don't think it's particularly helpful that Bluesky is kind of a bubble unto itself, and I'm not sure I particularly like that it exists. But people on Bluesky remain identifiably liberal in the way they were a few years ago. Whereas I’ll see people on Twitter who I would have considered centrist liberals talking about ‘the blacks’ or ‘immigrant invasions’. And I just think – can you hear yourself? But they can’t – and they can’t because they see themselves only as reflected through the social environment they are in. They feel like they are still in the middle of where everyone else is.

 David Klemperer:

Can I ask how your view of this applies to elites? In left wing circles, we often think that the reasons why say Tech elites have reacted so strongly against the Democrats of late is because they didn't like the kind of policy changes being pursued by people like Lina Khan, and that the ‘tech-lash’ is therefore an economically rational response from tech elites defending their interests. Is your view that powerful business and tech elites are protecting their economic interests through their political shift, or do you think they are they simply being radicalized by their own products?

 Will Stancil:

I one-hundred-percent think the latter. I actually think that there's almost no economic self-interest involved in this shift. For a start, you can make the argument that it wasn’t even in their economic self-interest – Trump’s economic policies and tariffs have been bad for almost everyone. I don’t think that destabilising the basic rule of law underpinning the US economy is good for tech elites or for anyone else. The new regulatory regime is pulling the wiring out of the economy generally.

Ultimately, I think that just like everyone else, elites are people, and so their politics arise from their internal view of the world. It’s all psychological – that’s the root. And their social environments are bizarre and distorted.

In some ways I think elites tend to be more susceptible to a lot of these processes. First off, they to be more immersed in their social environment than someone who’s, you know, a janitor who works eight or twelve hours a day and then comes home. If you are an elite you are more likely to be having constant conversations about politics, and constantly getting those social pressures.

I also think that highly educated people tend to be very good at rationalizing the positions that they are socially expected to hold. You see this with really high powered business leaders, commentators, politicians, that they're very good at arriving at the conclusion that is socially convenient. They might come up with a lot of highly sophisticated rationales for why they believe that, but you can’t help but notice that at the end of the day they are believing the thing that is embedded most deeply in their social environment.

 David Klemperer:

So you have this analysis of why current information environment created by social media is incredibly destructive. How, over the long term, should liberals, progressives and social democrats be looking to try and reshape the information environment and the wider public sphere? Do we need to suppress social media? Should we be creating alternative social media? You mentioned that you're not very impressed with Bluesky. What is it that in the long term we should looking to try to do?

 Will Stancil:

It’s very difficult, because ultimately – and this is where the structural analysis should be, and where the Marxists have a point – it all comes down to the economics of media production.

People like to say that social media companies are steering this, that it's algorithms, all this stuff. Those things may be a contributing factor, but the underlying cause is very simple: it used to be very expensive to publish to the world; now, it's very cheap. As a result, you have a lot more of it. That creates a dynamic where everyone has many sources to choose from, and that creates these essentially market forms of competition for audience share, and dynamics in which people are selecting and publishing the most emotional and compelling narratives.

How you fix that? I don't have a great solution. I think social media in general is a problem. I think that probably you can slow it down by putting some sort of strengthened moderation on there. No one remembers this today, but a couple years ago, it was actually expected, as a social media company, that you would have some sort of content moderation policy that meant you wouldn't just publish, like, racial slurs and neo-Nazi stuff everywhere. Or like, snuff videos – if you go on Twitter today, you are likely to be served disturbing videos of people being killed, and served conspiracy theories about Jews and the like. We should be able to institute a policy where you can’t publish this sort of stuff! And that should be expected!

Long term, I've seen people analogize this to the invention of the printing press, and to how it took basically centuries of warfare and chaos for us to figure out how to institute editorial standards that would prevent warfare and chaos. I think over time, we have to develop some sort of social norms – and frankly epistemological norms – about what sources you believe, and from where you derive your sense of what’s what, that can prevent this sort of hallucinatory social media environment from controlling our politics. How you accelerate that? I’ll be honest – I wish I had the answer!  

 David Klemperer:

So you wouldn't say that, because the free market in information is incredibly destructive, we need to seize the means of information production and nationalise social media?

Will Stancil:

So if I could press a button and nationalise all social media and then destroy it, I would probably do it in a heartbeat. But I don't think it's realistic. I think what we're seeing here is the result of technological advancements in publishing and video. The reality is that if I was going to publish a video to the whole world, it used to require a film crew, a broadcast studio, and some sort of national network to distribute the footage. Now I can do it from a $400 phone in my hand, just me. Putting that sort of technological advancement in public publishing back in the box is really difficult.

The question is therefore how we develop norms of information sharing and information interpretation, of interpreting media. And of course now we have AI that just generates stuff. Previously you could claim that Obama is secretly eating children in satanic rituals. But now you can just generate a video of him doing it and spit that out. So things will get worse before they get better.

Will Stancil is a research fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity

David Klemperer is a historian and researcher working at the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research, and co-editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.

Morgan Jones is co-editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.