## How Liberal Outrage Becomes an Asset in the Political Economy of the Far Right
### A Machiavellian Inquiry into Virtue, Spectacle, and the Extraordinary Profitability of Being Offended
*For Clout Economics*
**The contemporary liberal has discovered an extraordinary method of opposing authoritarian power: publicly informing the authoritarian, several times a day, that he is an authoritarian. The authoritarian has expressed his gratitude and forwarded the information to his supporters.**
There is something almost touching about the arrangement.
The liberal denounces the vulgarity of the political leader. The leader incorporates vulgarity into his claim to represent ordinary people. The liberal objects to his contempt for established institutions. The leader declares that the institutions were corrupt to begin with. The liberal exposes the leader's indifference to respectable opinion. The leader presents that indifference as proof that he cannot be purchased by respectable society.
The accusation becomes evidence.
The evidence becomes publicity.
The publicity becomes a political identity.
And the critic, who believes himself to be undermining the authority of the leader, may discover that he has been supplying the leader with precisely the opposition through which that authority becomes intelligible.
This is not the claim that liberal criticism caused the rise of the far right. That would be historically unserious. Right-wing populism is organised through political movements, institutions, capital, inherited social divisions, media infrastructures, and genuine constituencies whose commitments cannot be reduced to resentment against liberals.
The narrower and more disturbing proposition is that **the political economy of contemporary media can convert certain forms of liberal outrage into resources for the movements they oppose**.
The conversion is not inevitable.
It depends upon who controls the means of circulation, who possesses the authority to interpret the controversy, and which material antagonisms the controversy makes visible—or conceals.
The relevant question is therefore not whether outrage is morally justified. Frequently it is.
The question is what becomes of outrage once it enters a system in which attention has commercial value, public denunciation has reputational value, and political movements can acquire legitimacy through the identity of their enemies.
The modern politician need not silence every critic.
He may only need to persuade his audience that the right people are criticising him.
Five centuries ago, a Florentine official understood something about this arrangement.
He did not have Instagram.
He had princes.
The difference is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
## I. The ruler who learned to be hated by the right people
In Chapter XVIII of *The Prince*, Machiavelli makes one of his most consequential observations:
> “It is very necessary to appear to have them.”
He is discussing the virtues conventionally expected of a ruler: mercy, fidelity, humanity, uprightness, and religion.
The difficulty is that possession of these qualities and public recognition of their possession are not identical.
Political authority operates through appearances that cannot always be reduced to the actual conduct of the ruler.
A prince may cultivate the reputation of virtue while pursuing policies that violate the virtues he publicly performs.
But the modern significance of the passage extends beyond hypocrisy.
The crucial distinction is between political conduct and its interpretation.
An act does not acquire a stable meaning simply because a critic has identified its moral character.
It enters a struggle over representation.
Consider a politician accused of lacking refinement.
The accusation presupposes an audience that understands refinement as a political virtue.
But what if the politician's supporters regard refinement as the language through which an unaccountable elite has historically exercised its superiority?
The criticism changes meaning.
It no longer demonstrates the politician's unfitness.
It demonstrates his distance from the people who possess the authority to define fitness.
The liberal experiences the accusation as a disclosure.
The populist movement can experience it as confirmation.
An important asymmetry emerges.
The critic believes that the politician's conduct has exposed him.
The politician may use the critic's reaction to expose the critic.
The controversy is no longer simply about what the leader has done.
It becomes a contest over who possesses the authority to judge.
The cultural status of the accuser becomes part of the political meaning of the accusation.
An argument that begins with the conduct of the ruler ends with the supposed arrogance of the people who condemn him.
This is how an objection to authoritarian behaviour can be reframed as an objection to democratic authenticity.
The liberal says: this person is unfit to govern.
The populist replies: behold the people who believe they alone have the authority to decide who is fit.
The dispute over conduct becomes a dispute over sovereignty.
And sovereignty is considerably more valuable to a political movement than the temporary embarrassment of an unfavourable headline.
## II. The political economy of being offended
The contemporary outrage economy did not emerge because human beings suddenly became more emotional.
It emerged through institutions that learned how to measure, rank, distribute, and monetise emotional expression.
The newspaper requires an audience.
The television channel requires ratings.
The social-media platform requires engagement.
The political party requires visibility, identification, and mobilisation.
The commentator requires recognition.
The moral controversy can supply something to all of them.
A statement produces an objection.
The objection produces a response.
The response produces a controversy.
The controversy produces an audience.
The audience becomes available for commercial and political interpretation.
The structure does not require every participant to act cynically.
The offended person may be sincerely offended.
The journalist may sincerely believe the issue deserves coverage.
The politician may sincerely believe the criticism is unjust.
The platform need not possess any coherent political ideology.
Its ranking system can nevertheless reward the interaction because the interaction generates measurable activity.
The resulting arrangement is best understood as a circulation mechanism.
Outrage is produced socially, converted into attention, and made available for competing forms of accumulation.
A 2021 study in *Science Advances* found that social rewards and group norms could reinforce expressions of moral outrage on Twitter. A 2025 algorithmic audit published in *PNAS Nexus* found that engagement-based ranking amplified emotionally charged hostility toward political out-groups relative to a chronological feed.
Neither study establishes that liberal outrage causes far-right electoral success. Their relevance is more precise: the technological conditions of public discussion can reward forms of political expression that perpetuate antagonism.
The audience need not become persuaded.
It need only remain engaged.
This creates an unusual political commodity: the publicly visible offence.
It can be condemned, defended, circulated, parodied, and continually reinterpreted.
The more antagonistic the positions become, the more occasions arise for their renewed expression.
The culture industry does not necessarily resolve the dispute.
It can acquire continuing value from the dispute's unresolved character.
The political movement that is especially adept at presenting itself as the victim of cultural elites may therefore discover a ready-made instrument.
Every denunciation becomes an opportunity to renew its foundational claim.
The ordinary people are being insulted.
The establishment despises their convictions.
The intellectuals regard them as backward.
The fashionable classes cannot tolerate their political independence.
The particular criticism may concern an identifiable statement or policy.
Its political circulation may transform it into evidence of an entire social hierarchy.
**The outrage is about the politician. The counter-outrage is about the people who dare to judge him.**
The second proposition can acquire greater political significance than the first.
## III. The liberal opposition has mistaken itself for the people
In Chapter IX of *The Prince*, Machiavelli distinguishes two conflicting political dispositions.
The powerful wish to command.
The people wish not to be oppressed.
His formulation is not a comprehensive theory of modern class society, but it contains an important lesson: the interests of the people cannot be inferred from the preferences of those who possess cultural or institutional authority.
This is where certain forms of liberal opposition become politically vulnerable.
The liberal public sphere may imagine that its own standards of competence, education, propriety, secularism, and sophistication are simply the universal standards of democratic life.
Its political judgements appear to proceed from reason itself.
But reason is delivered through institutions.
A professional vocabulary.
A university.
A newspaper.
An elite school.
A cultural association.
A metropolitan social network.
These institutions possess histories of class and caste access.
They are not automatically illegitimate because access is unequal. Nor are their claims necessarily false.
But their authority cannot be assumed to be socially neutral.
A liberal accusation that relies upon the presumed superiority of the accuser's manners may carry a meaning different from its explicit content.
The politician is not merely criticised.
He is measured against a standard whose social location becomes visible.
The populist can then reconstruct the encounter.
The critic is no longer a citizen evaluating a public official.
The critic becomes a representative of the elite evaluating the people.
The politician, however powerful, becomes the symbolic representative of those supposedly humiliated by that evaluation.
The inversion is remarkable.
A governing figure, potentially commanding immense institutional resources, can appear as the victim of a culturally privileged critic.
The critic, who may possess little actual political power, becomes the representative of an entire establishment.
The distribution of symbolic positions has ceased to correspond to the distribution of material resources.
This is particularly consequential in India, where the categories of liberal refinement, English-language education, caste privilege, urban sophistication, and institutional access can overlap without being identical.
A criticism of a government's policies may be grounded in constitutional principle.
But if the criticism is expressed as contempt for the tastes, language, or supposed ignorance of ordinary citizens, the political object changes.
The conduct of the government recedes.
The dignity of the audience becomes the apparent issue.
The politician is relieved of the burden of defending the policy.
He can defend the people against the insult.
The liberal intended to expose domination.
The controversy has been reorganised as an accusation of elite domination.
It is a formidable political conversion.
The accused has become the representative of the injured.
The accuser has become the representative of privilege.
And the original question may disappear entirely.
## IV. The extraordinary convenience of an enemy with a university degree
Machiavelli understood that political authority depends not simply upon possessing power but upon arranging the relationships through which power is recognised.
A ruler must understand which constituencies support him, which oppose him, and whose opposition can become politically consequential.
In modern populist politics, the enemy is not always an obstacle to political consolidation.
Under certain conditions, the enemy supplies the identity through which a movement understands itself.
The liberal elite is an especially productive opponent because it can be made to represent several antagonists simultaneously.
The old establishment.
The cosmopolitan class.
The privileged intellectual.
The insufficiently patriotic citizen.
The person who claims to speak for minorities.
The institution that appears to distribute prestige according to inaccessible rules.
These categories are neither naturally identical nor uniformly represented by actual liberals.
Their political usefulness lies in the possibility of combining them.
The adversary becomes a composite figure.
A disagreement over economic policy can become a dispute with the urban elite.
A criticism of majoritarian rhetoric can become an accusation that liberals are hostile to the religious majority.
A defence of minority rights can be reframed as evidence that the establishment favours minorities over ordinary citizens.
A dispute over historical interpretation can become a confrontation between national authenticity and foreign intellectual influence.
The liberal is not simply wrong.
The liberal becomes the explanation for what has gone wrong with the country.
The political movement acquires an enemy whose identity can accommodate almost any criticism it receives.
This is one of the mechanisms identified in scholarship on Indian national-populism.
In a 2024 analysis of India's political economy, Louise Tillin described how majoritarian populism has mobilised against a supposedly corrupt cosmopolitan establishment while combining nationalist identification with welfare provision and a highly unequal growth model.
The distinction is important.
The appeal cannot be explained simply through attacks on elites.
It also involves actual state programmes, material benefits, political organisation, and competing accounts of economic development.
But the anti-elite narrative supplies something that material policy alone may not provide.
It supplies an explanation for why the national project remains incomplete.
The elite has obstructed it.
The opposition has betrayed it.
The critics cannot bear the success of the people.
The movement becomes both government and insurgency.
It can exercise authority while continuing to narrate itself as rebellion against authority.
The governing party occupies the state.
The imaginary enemy occupies the establishment.
The arrangement is politically convenient because the responsibility of power can be displaced toward the identity of those who criticise power.
## V. The modern prince does not need to suppress the scandal
In Chapter XXI, Machiavelli considers how rulers acquire reputation through extraordinary enterprises and public acts.
His discussion of Ferdinand of Aragon is especially revealing.
Machiavelli observes how military and religious enterprises could occupy the attention of powerful constituencies while the ruler consolidated his authority.
The relevant mechanism is not simply deception.
It is the political organisation of attention.
A public spectacle can make certain actions central to the political imagination while other institutional transformations receive less scrutiny.
Modern media multiplies the possibilities of such organisation.
A controversy concerning the propriety of a statement may dominate an entire news cycle.
A dispute over a celebrity's political opinions can occupy public attention.
A television debate can become a public theatre of accusation.
A viral insult can produce days of competing indignation.
Meanwhile, the less spectacular work of political economy continues.
Budgets are allocated.
Contracts are awarded.
Regulations are changed.
Institutions are reorganised.
Labour conditions evolve.
Public assets are managed.
Financial influence is exercised.
These processes are not invisible, and serious journalists investigate them.
But they are rarely as immediately attractive to the attention economy as an insult directed at a recognisable individual.
Here the critical distinction is between the political significance of an event and its commercial fitness for representation.
The event that is easiest to circulate is not necessarily the event that most substantially transforms social relations.
In India, television news provides a particularly vivid illustration.
A 2022 Reuters Institute account of research by the Network of Women in Media, India described the prevalence of aggressive performances in televised news debates. The underlying monitoring exercise found aggressive behaviour in more than half of sampled news programmes, rising to 85 percent among talk shows.
The sample was limited, and the findings should not be treated as measurements of every Indian news channel.
But they document a form of media production in which confrontation is itself part of the programme's appeal.
The dispute is not simply reported.
It becomes entertainment.
The political representative becomes a performer.
The journalist becomes an adjudicator.
The audience is invited to witness the moral destruction of an opponent.
The object of public discussion is gradually transformed.
The question ceases to be what institutions have done.
It becomes who has prevailed in the performance of accusation.
The liberal critic may believe they are participating in accountability.
The political operator may recognise an opportunity for renewed mobilisation.
The broadcaster receives an audience.
The controversy becomes economically productive without becoming politically conclusive.
This is the difference between the theatrical defeat of a politician and the material limitation of political power.
One can occur every evening.
The other requires institutions.
## VI. The war against the elite that leaves the elite's property intact
The most consequential failure of a certain liberal outrage is not that it is excessively emotional.
It is that its object can remain insufficiently material.
The discourse is organised around offensive speech, improper conduct, symbolic representation, hypocrisy, embarrassment, and the violation of respectable norms.
These can be significant political issues.
But their exclusive occupation of the public sphere can displace questions concerning the distribution of economic power.
The modern Indian right has not grown through outrage alone.
It has developed through ideological organisations, electoral machinery, financial resources, welfare programmes, religious mobilisation, and sophisticated communications systems.
Research on the BJP's 2019 campaign identified an unusually extensive campaign apparatus, large expenditures, the use of mainstream and social media, and a strongly personalised political appeal.
An Oxford Handbook study examining Indian elections from 1996 to 2019 likewise emphasises long-term ideological alignment and the investment in campaign infrastructure, rather than reducing political outcomes to isolated media controversies.
These findings matter because they identify the limits of a simple theory that liberal outrage feeds the far right.
A political organisation with extensive resources and durable networks does not depend upon its opponents to invent its politics.
It can generate controversies.
It can choose which controversies to amplify.
It can interpret criticism through established ideological narratives.
And it can combine these narratives with material programmes that address particular constituents.
The liberal spectacle becomes useful only because a political organisation already possesses means of putting it to use.
This is the actual political economy of outrage.
Not a spontaneous exchange between two equally powerful camps.
A confrontation occurring within an unequal distribution of media resources, political organisation, money, and institutional access.
The right may possess significant advantages in some of these domains.
Its critics may possess prestige in others.
The controversy translates these unequal forms of power into an apparently symmetrical quarrel between offended parties.
Both sides are angry.
Both sides are performing.
Both sides claim injury.
The structural distribution of resources disappears into the equality of the spectacle.
But the possession of an opinion and the possession of an organisation capable of turning that opinion into policy are not equivalent.
Nor are the ability to deliver a devastating insult and the ability to alter the legal conditions of citizenship.
The theatre can make political antagonists appear equally powerful even when their capacities to govern are radically different.
The more successful the spectacle, the easier this inequality becomes to overlook.
The audience sees two people shouting.
It does not necessarily see who owns the microphone.
## VII. The liberal has confused moral innocence with political power
Machiavelli's enduring importance lies partly in his refusal to treat politics as the automatic expression of moral virtue.
The recognition that a policy is unjust does not explain how the policy may be defeated.
The exposure of hypocrisy does not establish that the hypocrite will lose authority.
A declaration of principle does not necessarily alter an institution.
These are distinct political problems.
The contemporary liberal public sphere can sometimes treat the moral validity of a criticism as evidence that the criticism ought to be politically effective.
An offensive statement has been identified.
A contradiction has been exposed.
A public figure has been corrected.
The argument has been won.
But the opponent may be engaged in a different contest.
The critic seeks to establish moral inconsistency.
The politician seeks to establish political identification.
The critic appeals to universal standards.
The politician contests the authority of the people claiming to speak for those standards.
The critic expects embarrassment.
The politician's audience may experience solidarity.
The apparent failure of the politician to acknowledge criticism can therefore become a form of political strength.
The liberal concludes that the audience is irrational.
The audience concludes that the liberal does not understand it.
The dispute acquires an increasingly stable structure.
Each side receives confirmation of its existing account of the other.
The liberal sees authoritarianism.
The nationalist sees elitism.
The political economy of the controversy rewards the repetition.
This is not an argument for abandoning moral judgement.
It is an argument against confusing moral judgement with a complete theory of political action.
The exposure of wrongdoing is indispensable to democratic accountability.
But exposure must be connected to institutions capable of producing consequences.
An investigation.
A legal challenge.
A labour organisation.
A change in regulation.
A durable political coalition.
A material redistribution of resources.
Without such connections, moral criticism can become a recurring assertion of the critic's own rectitude.
The public acquires a performance of accountability without necessarily acquiring accountability itself.
The politician survives the performance.
The critic prepares the next one.
## VIII. The social-media republic has created a new aristocracy of conviction
There is a second problem concealed within the liberal theatre of outrage.
Public moral judgement can become a form of social distinction.
The person who recognises an offence demonstrates cultural competence.
They understand which words are unacceptable.
Which historical references are dangerous.
Which forms of behaviour reproduce hierarchy.
Which political gestures reveal authoritarian tendencies.
Their ability to identify these things may reflect serious intellectual and ethical commitments.
But the public performance of recognition can also confer status.
The correct objection becomes a credential.
The sophisticated denunciation becomes evidence of belonging to an enlightened community.
The critic acquires prestige through the visible demonstration of superior judgement.
The logic is particularly unstable in a society where education and institutional recognition are distributed through histories of caste and class advantage.
The public assertion of moral sophistication may inadvertently reproduce the social hierarchy that the criticism claims to oppose.
One form of superiority is displaced by another.
The inherited aristocracy is challenged by an aristocracy of conviction.
Membership no longer depends simply upon birth.
It depends upon the capacity to demonstrate the correct political literacy.
The problem is not that knowledge should be abandoned or that discriminatory speech should be excused.
The problem is what happens when moral recognition becomes a competitive cultural asset.
The public sphere begins rewarding the demonstration of superiority over the construction of common political interests.
Political disagreement is transformed into a contest over who possesses the authority to feel contempt.
This creates precisely the kind of opposition from which anti-elite populism can benefit.
The liberal critic claims the prestige of superior enlightenment.
The populist claims the prestige of rebellion against enlightenment's social gatekeepers.
Each position can become dependent upon the existence of the other.
The liberal requires the backward figure whose errors confirm liberal sophistication.
The populist requires the condescending liberal whose disapproval confirms popular authenticity.
The two figures enter a relationship of reciprocal recognition.
Both become increasingly useful to the other's identity.
Neither needs to resolve the material contradiction that originally made the dispute political.
## IX. The private conversation becomes a national battlefield
The modern prince's political environment differs from Machiavelli's principally in the infrastructure through which legitimacy circulates.
The court has become dispersed.
Its discussions occur in television studios, messaging groups, neighbourhood associations, family networks, video platforms, and the innumerable interfaces through which political speech enters ordinary life.
A particularly revealing study by Ekta Oza, Philippa Williams, and Lipika Kamra, published in 2024, examines the role of WhatsApp in the reproduction of Hindu nationalist political identity.
Their research, grounded in fieldwork in New Delhi during the 2019 national elections, shows how political messages circulate through relationships whose authority derives partly from family, familiarity, and everyday trust.
The message arrives not merely as party propaganda.
It arrives from an uncle.
A neighbour.
A former colleague.
A member of a community group.
The content acquires credibility through its social route.
The political atmosphere is produced within the ordinary relationships through which people understand themselves as belonging.
This is much more important than the fantasy of a population hypnotised by a single leader.
The political movement becomes present within everyday life.
Its categories are repeated through trusted relationships.
Its narratives become familiar before they are subjected to public argument.
And its forms of inclusion and exclusion can acquire force within spaces that are not formally political.
Now consider the limitations of the liberal viral denunciation.
It may circulate widely among people who already share the critic's interpretation.
The nationalist response may circulate through separate networks in which the meaning of the controversy is transformed.
A single event acquires different political realities.
For one public, the event proves authoritarianism.
For another, it proves liberal hostility toward the nation.
The circulation does not produce a common judgement.
It can intensify the separation between interpretive communities.
The same controversy becomes useful to antagonistic audiences for incompatible reasons.
The critic has spoken.
But the conditions under which the statement will be interpreted have not been transformed.
This is one of the defining limitations of a politics that assumes visibility will eventually produce agreement.
The political problem is not simply the absence of information.
It is the social organisation of credibility.
Who is trusted?
Which institutions are believed?
Which relationships carry authority?
Whose account appears consistent with the audience's actual experiences?
These are questions of political organisation, not merely better wording.
The prince has understood that an accusation matters only through the relationships in which it becomes believable.
The liberal has attached a citation.
The family group has forwarded a different explanation.
## X. The republican correction: Not all outrage belongs to the prince
There is, however, a danger in the preceding argument.
If every expression of anger is treated as a contribution to the far right's publicity, then opposition itself becomes suspect.
The authoritarian acquires an extraordinary immunity.
Criticise him and you make him stronger.
Remain silent and he governs without opposition.
The argument becomes incapable of distinguishing politically consequential dissent from commercially recycled indignation.
This would be a serious mistake.
And Machiavelli himself supplies the correction.
In the *Discourses on Livy*, he defends the conflicts between Roman commoners and nobles as sources of republican freedom.
He does not imagine political order as the elimination of public antagonism.
He understands that conflict can produce institutions that restrain domination.
The plebeians' struggles were not merely expressions of anger.
They acquired political consequence through institutional changes, including the creation of offices capable of defending the interests of commoners.
The distinction is decisive.
Outrage can be emancipatory when it becomes part of a struggle over the actual distribution of power.
It is not automatically absorbed by the spectacle.
A protest may produce a legal reform.
A campaign may expose wrongdoing.
A movement may alter public expenditure.
A coalition may protect a vulnerable population.
A strike may change the terms of employment.
The relevant question is not whether people are angry.
It is what political form the anger acquires.
Does it remain a repetitive declaration of moral distance?
Or does it become a durable effort to change institutions?
Does it produce only an audience?
Or does it create capacities for collective action?
Does it identify a person whose humiliation will satisfy the public?
Or does it identify relations whose transformation would alter the conditions that generated the grievance?
This is where the modern political economy of outrage requires its most important distinction.
**There is outrage that reproduces the spectacle of political conflict, and there is conflict that reorganises the institutions through which political power operates.**
The two may overlap.
They must not be confused.
## XI. The art of not becoming your opponent's publicity department
The uncomfortable possibility is that certain forms of liberal outrage provide the far right with a recurring opportunity to demonstrate its distance from the people who claim cultural authority.
But this does not establish that the far right is merely reacting to liberal provocation.
It is capable of producing its own antagonisms, sustaining its own institutions, and determining which controversies become useful.
Nor does it establish that liberal actors are uniformly wealthy, elitist, or politically ineffective.
The category includes very different movements, institutions, and traditions.
The useful analytical question is narrower.
Under what circumstances does criticism of political power become a resource for political power?
The answer depends upon several conditions.
The political actor must possess an audience inclined to interpret criticism as evidence of external hostility.
The media system must make controversy easy to circulate.
The critic's identity must be capable of representing a broader antagonistic social category.
And the political organisation must possess means of translating the controversy into durable legitimacy.
Where those conditions are present, even accurate criticism can acquire unintended political consequences.
Accuracy does not guarantee control over reception.
But the recognition of this problem should not produce self-censorship.
It should produce greater analytical attention to the relationship between publicity and institutional consequence.
An objection to discriminatory law is not merely a performance of cultural superiority.
A legal challenge has a different political structure from a viral insult.
A documented investigation into corporate influence differs from a social-media quarrel over whether a politician possesses the correct manners.
A movement confronting caste discrimination differs from a fashionable demonstration of contempt toward supposedly backward voters.
Political criticism becomes more intelligible when its objects are specified.
Which institution?
Which decision?
Which law?
Which allocation of resources?
Which mechanism of exclusion?
Which documented consequence?
These questions do not eliminate the possibility of ideological manipulation.
They make the argument less dependent upon the personal prestige of the critic.
The criticism no longer asks the public to accept the superiority of the speaker.
It asks the public to examine the operation of power.
That is a more difficult kind of politics.
It is also considerably less glamorous.
There may be no satisfying moment when the villain is publicly humiliated.
There may instead be months of work examining documents, institutions, employment arrangements, budgets, and legal procedures.
The camera may lose interest.
The publicist may remain unemployed.
The political question may finally become serious.
## Conclusion: The prince has read the comments
The liberal imagination sometimes treats the public identification of hypocrisy as the beginning of political collapse.
The hypocrite has been exposed.
The contradiction is visible.
The moral judgement is correct.
The audience ought to withdraw its support.
But political authority does not operate through the automatic conversion of moral judgement into institutional consequence.
The modern prince inhabits an environment in which criticism can be interpreted, circulated, and converted into recognition.
He may be condemned as vulgar and present vulgarity as authenticity.
He may be accused of hostility toward elites and present that hostility as evidence of popular allegiance.
He may be criticised by prestigious institutions and use their prestige to establish that his political identity remains independent of them.
He need not win the moral argument.
He may only need to make the argument itself demonstrate a more useful political distinction.
The sophisticated against the ordinary.
The establishment against the people.
The cosmopolitan against the patriotic.
The critic against the nation.
These oppositions are constructed rather than natural, and their political power depends upon historical conditions, organisations, and institutions.
But once established, they can transform the meaning of public denunciation.
The liberal accuses the prince.
The prince points toward the accuser.
The audience recognises an enemy.
The media recognises a controversy.
The platform recognises engagement.
The political organisation recognises an opportunity.
An entire economic and political apparatus has converted the exposure of power into another means of reproducing its legitimacy.
This is not proof that criticism should cease.
It is proof that criticism cannot remain satisfied with being correct.
The great difficulty of opposing authoritarian politics lies not in establishing that authoritarian conduct deserves criticism.
It lies in constructing forms of public power capable of making that criticism consequential.
The liberal outrage that remains trapped in the economy of recognition can become one more component of the spectacle it condemns.
The political conflict that reorganises institutions may become something else.
Machiavelli understood the difference between the reputation of power and the conditions of its maintenance.
The contemporary critic would do well to remember it.
The prince has no objection to being called a villain if the accusation helps establish that he is the only person willing to confront the people who call him one.
He has read the comments.
He has studied the objections.
He has forwarded the most useful ones.
The public has been invited to observe another extraordinary confrontation between tyranny and enlightenment.
The broadcaster has sold the advertising.
The platform has registered the engagement.
The commentator has acquired another audience.
And the political institutions whose operations made the controversy significant remain available for tomorrow's examination.
**The prince does not need you to love him.**
**He does not necessarily need you to fear him.**
**He may find it sufficient that the people who already distrust you can see how much you despise him.**
The distinction is not philosophical.
It is commercial, organisational, and political.
The prince has understood the market for his enemies.
The enemies have not yet decided whether they wish to understand the prince.
---
### Sources and intellectual references
**Primary political texts**
- Niccolò Machiavelli, [*The Prince*, Chapter IX](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Historical%2C_Political%2C_and_Diplomatic_Writings_of_Niccolo_Machiavelli/Volume_2/The_Prince/Chapter_9), on the competing political dispositions of the people and the powerful.
- Machiavelli, [*The Prince*, Chapter XVIII](https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/217/the-prince/5598/chapter-18-concerning-the-way-in-which-princes-should-keep-faith/), on the appearance of virtue and political reputation.
- Machiavelli, [*The Prince*, Chapter XXI](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1232/pg1232-images.html), on reputation, public enterprises, and the organisation of political attention.
- Machiavelli, [*Discourses on Livy*, Book I, Chapter IV](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10827/10827-h/10827-h.htm), on public conflict as a potential foundation of republican freedom.
**Contemporary research**
- William J. Brady and colleagues, [“How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks”](https://isps.yale.edu/resource/how-social-learning-amplifies-moral-outrage-expression-in-online-social-networks), *Science Advances* (2021).
- [“Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media”](https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf062
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