Nobody is born with a political identity. We acquire our beliefs, loyalties and expectations through experience, relationships, language and the cultures in which we live. These identities help us make sense of the world, particularly when the world seems uncertain or threatening. Yet insecurity is not simply something people feel. It also arises within increasingly interconnected systems of communication, where changing circumstances continually demand new responses, reassurance and adjustment. Technology intensifies these relationships, but its development is also driven by competition, uncertainty and conflict. Conflict stimulates innovation, while new technologies change how people communicate, compete and understand themselves. Political identities offer a sense of stability within these shifting relationships, but defending them can generate further uncertainty and opposition. The pursuit of security becomes a means of reproducing insecurity, and the process increasingly sustains itself.
Political identity is better understood as a relational phenomenon than as a fixed collection of belief. Social identity theory establishes the significance of group differentiation (Tajfel and Turner, 1979), while uncertainty–identity theory explains how insecurity encourages attachment to sharply defined groups (Hogg, 2007). Research on affective polarisation demonstrates how political affiliation can become centred upon hostility towards opponents rather than agreement within one’s own group (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012). Communication technologies reinforce these tendencies through feedback, selective exposure and emotional amplification, while political identities shape the technologies, institutions and cultural expectations through which they are expressed. Neither exists independently of the other. Political conflict can consequently become a means of sustaining the identities ostensibly assembled to resolve it. An impressive arrangement, if the objective is to keep everyone perpetually occupied.
Opposing political identities are not independent entities confronting one another across an empty divide. They are mutually dependent patterns of difference, bound within a larger self-propagating system of communication. Each side helps establish the distinctions through which the other recognises itself, while its responses continually alter the conditions to which the other must adapt. Even the convenient fiction of two opposing sides conceals extensive internal differences, whose ambiguous and sometimes contradictory relationships reproduce, transform and occasionally undermine the antagonism between them. These differences are not merely fractures within otherwise unified identities; they help constitute those identities, generating further dependencies and possibilities throughout the system.
What opposing identities say about themselves may differ enormously, while what they actually do, how they recruit, exclude, threaten and reproduce themselves, may be remarkably similar. This relationship between semantic opposition and functional symmetry is itself consequential. As an identity becomes increasingly fractious, its attempts to maintain unity through reaffirmation, exclusion and conflict can generate further insecurity and internal division. The resulting feedback may become destructive, eventually undermining the movement’s own capacity to persist. Some movements prolong their existence by directing internal contradictions towards external enemies, but this merely redistributes the instability. The wider system can survive the destruction of particular movements and generate replacements. Nobody escapes the bill merely by winning an argument.
What we recognise as political movements, populism, authority, ideology or collective identity are transient, stochastic constellations within a wider communication system. Their names suggest discrete and enduring things, but their existence depends upon recurring patterns of signalling, recognition, expectation, allegiance and opposition. They form, stabilise, fracture and disappear as relationships change. Their particular expressions may be unpredictable, while the conditions favouring their emergence can be remarkably predictable. A system characterised by insecurity, competitive differentiation, concentrated authority and continual demands for affirmation can repeatedly generate recognisable forms of political identity. Populism, for example, is one possible expression of communicative behaviour arising from conditions extending well beyond politics, as explored in Populism Without a Populist.
Communication itself has a metabolic character: its exchanges generate further exchanges, dependencies and possibilities, sustaining continuity through transformation. Relationships between participants can themselves enter into further relationships, generating an expanding multiplicity of self-propagating patterns. The investigation here is philosophical rather than statistical. Statistics can describe frequencies, distributions and correlations, but the underlying dependencies and transformations can also be examined through the relationships that make particular outcomes possible.
A political movement is a provisional, self-propagating configuration of recursively coupled semantic, affective and communicative relationships. Its identity arises through the differential persistence of patterns across continual transformation, rather than residing independently in its participants, doctrines or institutions. Semantic ambiguity is constitutive: it permits divergent interpretations, intentions and values to sustain recognisable collective identities without requiring agreement or equivalence. Meaning and value are consequently inseparable questions of relational significance, differentiation and persistence. Insecurity similarly binds aspirationally stable identities through recurring demands for recognition, affirmation and defence. Opposing movements may be semantically incompatible yet functionally symmetrical, their antagonism sustaining the distinctions upon which both depend.
These relationships generate further dependencies, contradictions and possibilities. Ambiguity allows different meanings to coexist within a shared identity, while antinomy arises when mutually incompatible principles or claims remain implicated in the same system, without either being independently sufficient to resolve their opposition. Neither is simply an error awaiting correction. Both participate in the formation, persistence and transformation of political identities. Self-propagation is simultaneously generative and destructive: the mechanisms sustaining a movement can progressively undermine its persistence while reproducing the wider conditions from which comparable movements emerge. Political change need not constitute systemic transformation. The fundamental question is not simply what political movements mean, believe or intend, but how meaning, value and identity arise through recursively self-propagating relationships whose consequences transform their own conditions of possibility. The central paradox is that opposing political identities depend upon one another for the differences through which they become identifiable at all, yet their reciprocal antagonism can progressively destroy both. The very relationship necessary to sustain their distinct identities can become the mechanism of their mutual dissolution. Neither can eliminate the other without transforming the conditions of its own identity. And so the whole damn thing keeps running.
Key takeaways
- Political identities are acquired and sustained through relationships, language, insecurity and communication, rather than existing as independent collections of beliefs.
- Opposing political identities depend upon one another for the differences through which each becomes recognisable. Their antagonism can also undermine both.
- Political movements are transient, self-propagating configurations. Their recurring behaviour may be more consequential than their declared values or intentions.
- Semantic ambiguity permits collective identity without uniform interpretation. Contradictions and unresolved differences can sustain political movements as well as destabilise them.
- Changing political leaders or movements does not necessarily change the communication system that continually generates comparable conflicts.
References
Hogg, M.A. (2007) ‘Uncertainty–identity theory’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, pp. 69–126.
Iyengar, S., Sood, G. and Lelkes, Y. (2012) ‘Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), pp. 405–431.
Tajfel, H. and Turner, J.C. (1979) ‘An integrative theory of intergroup conflict’, in Austin, W.G. and Worchel, S. (eds.) The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, pp. 33–47.
