The digital subject of right-wing populist propaganda: doubling and simulation in the Trump campaigns

One prominent response to the rise of right-wing populism across the West has been to call for a listening approach to the emerging “people’s will” to understand what social and economic grievances lie behind the growing support for far right parties. While grievances might have some explanatory value, what if this “people’s will” is itself largely manufactured and a product of political propaganda aimed at manipulating voters?

Drawing on political theory, human-technology relations, and digital anthropology, I will explore this second route and focus on the interactions between the discursive and algorithmic dimensions in the Trump presidential campaigns (2016-2024).

The story starts with the now-defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used data-driven political marketing in support of the 2016 Trump campaign. According to the available evidence from whistleblowers, journalistic investigations, and commissions of inquiry, Cambridge Analytica allegedly ran a real-time simulation of the US electorate, where digital doubles of US voters were targeted with highly customised political messages through multiple platforms. This simulatory approach then evolved from mimicking (an attempt to create copies of real-life voters, where the copy takes on an autonomous life of its own) to mimicry (creating a distorted mirror of liberal democracy to erode the latter at its very foundation) with the manipulation of the QAnon movement, which converged with other movements in the January 6 Capitol riots.

I argue that, by creating digital doubles of analogue voters and distorted mirrors of liberal democratic political realities, propagandists can deeply shape and influence people’s political “common sense” through manipulation rather than persuasion. The new digital subjects and political realities produced effectively compete with and have the potential to capture the analogue selves and liberal democratic institutions to which they are intimately linked.