What once destroyed presidents now elects them

The scandal that could still destroy

There was a time, not so long ago, when showing the hidden mechanism of power could destroy a presidency. Watergate was not only a case of political espionage, nor only an American institutional crisis. It was also a scene of revelation. A part of power appeared doing precisely what, according to the public rules, it was not supposed to do. The distance between what the system claimed to be and what some of its operators did in secret became unbearable. Richard Nixon’s presidency fell because exposing the backstage still triggered a strong normative sanction.

That scene allows us to pose an uncomfortable question about the present. What has changed so that visible transgression, the humiliation of the adversary, the breaking of basic norms of institutional courtesy or the flaunting of pragmatic rules no longer necessarily destroy political careers, but sometimes propel them?

The quick answer would be to blame technology. Social networks radicalise. Algorithms reward rage. Artificial intelligence will accelerate propaganda. All of that may contain part of the truth, but it is not enough. Political anthropology has spent decades mistrusting single-cause explanations. The question is not whether technology caused contemporary extremism. The question is what it reconfigured in the political field so that certain forms of disruptive, personalist and extreme leadership ceased to be unviable.

Trump, Milei and Netanyahu are not equivalent. They do not come from the same political system, nor do they express the same historical genealogy. Putin, moreover, recalls the limit of the model. His power rests far more on a security apparatus, on the monopoly of the media and on state coercion than on an economy of engagement. But all these names appear in a time when authority, visibility, grievance and belonging have changed their medium. Politics no longer circulates only through parties, parliaments, the press, trade unions or bureaucracies. It also circulates through timelines, clips, memes, closed groups, metrics, automated recommenders and affective communities that live in permanent connection.

That displacement does not create extreme politics from scratch. It makes it more habitable.

The badly posed question

Political anthropology learned that prudence by studying far older problems. Theories on the origin of the state long sought a principal cause. Irrigation, war, demographic pressure, environmental circumscription, stratification, redistribution or the influence of prior states were all proposed as decisive engines. But comparative assessment gradually shifted the search for a single cause towards systemic models. The state did not appear because an isolated factor mechanically pushed it into being. It appeared where several conditions interacted and fed back on one another.

That lesson serves to think about our present. It makes no sense to ask whether the smartphone, the internet, social networks or AI produced Trump, Milei or the radicalisation of the Israeli right. That question is badly framed. Technologies do not vote, do not draft programmes, do not build social coalitions on their own. But they do reorder the conditions of possibility.

The defensible question is another one. What kind of political field appears when decades of neoliberalism erode institutional trust, when everyday life becomes market competition, when platforms concentrate public attention and when visible transgression becomes a form of capital.

There technology ceases to be a cause and becomes infrastructure. It does not push history on its own, but it modifies the paths along which history can circulate. An infrastructure does not determine what happens within it, but it makes some actions easier, more profitable, more visible or more repeatable than others. A road does not cause an army, but it changes war. An electrical grid does not cause a factory, but it transforms what a factory can do. A platform does not cause extreme politics, but it changes which styles of authority survive best.

The suspicion, then, can be formulated with more care. Digital technology did not create contemporary political extremism. What it did was reconfigure the space in which malaise, the symbol, transgression and leadership compete to become power.

When the market ran out of promise

Before the platforms there was another great transformation. Reagan and Thatcher did not cause Trump or Milei. But the neoliberal advance they symbolise profoundly modified the ordinary experience of social life. Housing, employment, education, health, leisure, prestige and even affective bonds were progressively rewritten in terms of market, performance, investment, choice and individual responsibility.

That transformation was not only economic. It was moral. The person was invited to understand themselves as a project, a brand, an enterprise of the self, a portfolio of competences, a competitive profile. Housing became an asset. Work became employability. Education became investment. Affection became a market of possibilities. Identity became the management of visibility. Failure became an individual deficit.

Zygmunt Bauman gave a name to the texture of that experience. Liquid modernity describes a world where bonds become provisional, commitments revocable and identities projects under permanent revision. Bauman —who was not an anthropologist, but who thought about everyday life with an attention any ethnographer would recognise— also distinguished community from network. Community precedes the person and is not chosen; the network is built and dismantled, contact by contact, with the same logic by which any other portfolio is managed. Connecting and disconnecting replace belonging. When belonging itself becomes liquid, the political promise of a solid belonging —nation, people, restored greatness— acquires an enormous value.

For a time, the promise of the market could hold. It offered a practical legitimacy. There was no need to love the system if the system seemed to produce mobility, consumption, credit or expectation. But when the promise cracks, institutional legitimacy is weakened. The financial crisis of 2008 worked as a hinge because it made visible that the market was neither a neutral arbiter nor a meritocratic machine. It could fail, rescue those who had won too much, expel those who had obeyed too much and, even so, keep presenting itself as the only possible horizon. And to that cracking another is added, more silent and more profound. The very decades that commodified everything accelerated environmental degradation, while global emissions kept growing to new historical highs. By that route too the future narrowed as a credible horizon just when the market demanded it as its sole promise.

In terms of political anthropology, neoliberalism eroded reserves of consensual power. It did not eliminate coercion or transaction, but it weakened basic trust in the system. When everything is measured as market and the market fails, authority loses one of its languages of justification. That void can be occupied by charismatic, punitive or restorationist forms of legitimacy.

Here the notion of revitalisation movement proves useful. Anthony F. C. Wallace proposed it to describe collective, deliberate and organised efforts of cultural reconstruction in situations of crisis. It is not simply nostalgia. It is about recomposing a world perceived as damaged, fallen or stolen. MAGA works in that register. Make America Great Again is not only an electoral slogan. It is a promise to restore a lost plenitude. Something similar, though with different grammars, occurs when Milei promises to cut “the caste” out at the root, to purify the system by means of a symbolic chainsaw and to return to society a freedom supposedly confiscated.

Neoliberalism produces grievance, but it does not decide its political form. That form is built afterwards, on another terrain.

The backstage begins to show

Politics always had a stage and a backstage. Erving Goffman taught us to think of social life as a management of impressions, with spaces of public performance and spaces of preparation, calculation, rest or contradiction. Joshua Meyrowitz later showed that television and electronic media had already begun to alter that separation. Some forms of authority depended on keeping audiences apart and controlling who saw what. Television disordered part of that balance.

Watergate still belongs to a world where the appearance of the backstage could be lethal. The problem was not only that there were pragmatic operations of power. The problem was that those operations were seen and were confronted with the normative rules of liberal democracy. Exposure worked as scandal because a sufficiently shared moral boundary still existed.

Platforms change that scene. They do not invent the backstage or manipulation, but they modify its public yield. Visible transgression can present itself as authenticity. The insult can be read as frankness. The breaking of rules can become proof that the one who leads does not belong to the system. Aggression can appear as courage. The lie can shift from the terrain of verification to the terrain of loyalty.

The novelty is not that power has backstages. The novelty is that a growing part of contemporary power is built by showing the backstage as spectacle, measuring the reaction and automating its repetition.

There platforms do not act as mere channels. They act as systems of reward. Each transgression can be tested, measured, repeated, varied and have its tone adjusted according to the echo it produces. What once required intuition, political instinct or a heavy propaganda apparatus can now be iterated in real time.

Television began to erode the distance between stage and backstage. Platforms monetised that erosion. AI threatens to automate it.

Transgression changes its sign

Frederick G. Bailey distinguished between normative rules and pragmatic rules in the political game. The former are those declared publicly, the ones that allow an action to be judged as right or wrong. The latter are those that serve to win. In all politics both exist. The stability of a political arena depends, in part, on the competing parties accepting common rules, even if they manoeuvre within them. A political field, by contrast, appears when rival groups share no prior rules for regulating the conflict.

Watergate revealed pragmatic rules and still produced normative sanction. That is the key. Nixon did not fall because power was innocent before Watergate. He fell because the public exposure of certain manoeuvres remained incompatible with the normative standard that American democracy itself claimed to uphold.

In platformised politics, that relation is partly inverted. The revelation of the pragmatic rule no longer always destroys. Sometimes it confirms. The one who insults is not left out of the game, but demonstrates that they do not submit to “the forms”. The one who exaggerates is not discredited, but expresses an emotional truth deeper than factual accuracy. The one who humiliates the press, the courts or the opposition does not necessarily lose legitimacy, because their legitimacy no longer comes from respecting the common arena, but from acting as if that arena were corrupt.

Trump and Milei have understood this mutation with particular clarity. They do not play by feigning full adherence to shared rules. They play by displaying that they do not fully recognise them. Their institutional adversaries often respond as if the arena were still intact. They denounce the infraction, point to the broken norm, expect the revelation to produce sanction. But in a field reordered by platforms, the infraction can circulate as proof of strength.

The attention economy does not reward transgression because it is ideologically of the right or of the left. It rewards it because it condenses conflict, produces reaction, forces a taking of sides and simplifies belongings. Visible transgression thus becomes a political technology. Not because it is new, but because its rate of return has changed.

Symbols that survive a change of side

Power does not circulate through arguments alone. It circulates through symbols. David Kertzer insisted that effective political symbols condense meaning, admit multiple voices and preserve ambiguity. They do not mean a single thing. Precisely for that reason they work. They allow different publics to project onto them expectations, grievances and desires that are not always compatible.

Platforms select that type of object very well. A symbol that is too precise soon exhausts itself. An ambiguous, condensed and multivocal symbol produces conversation, dispute, identification and rejection. It does not need to resolve its meanings. It lives off keeping them open.

“The caste” is an especially fertile example because it does not belong stably to a single ideological family. In Italy, the term gained centrality with the book by Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella on the privileges of the political class. In Spain, Podemos turned it into a moral boundary during its electoral breakthrough in 2014. Years later, Milei rearticulated it in Argentina from a right-wing libertarianism. There is hardly better proof of symbolic efficacy than a sign capable of passing from Italian anti-politics to Spanish left-wing populism and from there to Argentine libertarianism without losing its force of condensation.

The same symbol allows different things to be said. For some people, “the caste” names the oligarchic capture of democracy. For others, the parasitic state. For others, the privilege of parties, trade unions, the media, universities or bureaucracies. Its potency lies not in precision, but in the capacity to organise heterogeneous frustrations under one and the same enemy object.

MAGA operates in another way, but with a similar logic. The red cap condenses nation, nostalgia, class, race, masculinity, grievance, media defiance and ritual belonging. Milei’s chainsaw condenses cleansing, symbolic violence, cuts, punishment, spectacle and a promise of refoundation. They are not programmes. They are devices of recognition.

The algorithm does not create those symbols by itself, but it contributes to selecting them. The platform works as a sieve that varies messages relentlessly, measures the echo and retains what circulates. What condenses too little does not travel. What does not generate dispute fades out. What does not allow multiple appropriations becomes sectarian or technical. The symbols that survive are those that best transform ambiguity into circulation.

The leader as a redistributor of attention

The form of leadership also changes. Charismatic authority has been thought of as one of the great sources of political legitimacy. But there is another useful comparison, if handled with care. Trump and Milei are not Melanesian “great men”. That would be a clumsy equivalence. And yet some traits of their leaderships present formal resemblances to the big man model described by Marshall Sahlins. Authority built on the person, permanent competition, constant redistribution and dependence on followers who must be fed symbolically again and again.

In the classical model, redistribution could be material. Prestige, goods, feasts, debts, alliances. In platformised politics, what is redistributed is attention. The leader offers visibility, grievance, pride, targeted insults, recognisable enemies, small expressive victories, a sense of belonging and the opportunity to take part in a common epic.

This redistribution is not secondary. It is the centre. A follower receives something each time the leader names the enemy, humiliates the adversary, defies the press, breaks a protocol or produces a viral gesture. They receive indirect recognition. The leader seems to tell them that their rage was legitimate, that their contempt had a basis, that their loss was not a private failure, that the world is badly organised and that someone, at last, dares to say so.

There is one further trait worth naming. This grammar of leadership is heavily masculinised. Agonistic competition, the insult as currency, the display of toughness, the public humiliation of the rival. The entire repertoire rewards a performance of combative masculinity that Trump, Milei or Putin embody with variations. It is not that the radical right lacks women leaders —Meloni, Le Pen or Weidel lead central projects in Europe—, but even they operate within a grammar that was not written for them, and which they negotiate case by case. The big man model, it is worth recalling, was already in its ethnographic context a game of men. Youth, meanwhile, appears in these movements above all as audience and as the labour force of the meme; rarely as leadership.

That is why these leaderships are unstable. They need to produce scene constantly. They do not rest comfortably in the institution, because their energy comes from defying it. But, at the same time, they need to capture institutions in order not to dissolve. Hence the pressure to control courts, modify electoral rules, discipline bureaucracies, colonise public media, reward loyalties and turn the movement into a lasting structure. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argued in Why Nations Fail that the prosperity of nations depends in large measure on inclusive institutions, as opposed to extractive arrangements that concentrate power and wealth. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and Robinson for their studies on how institutions are formed and how they affect prosperity, reinforces the pertinence of that framework for reading contemporary institutional capture.

Platform charisma does not want to remain performance. It wants to become regime. But in institutionalising itself it runs the risk of losing the exteriority that feeds it. That tension explains much of contemporary politics.

From the closed perimeter to automation

Robert Carneiro proposed that war does not always centralise power. Often it disperses it. Only under conditions of circumscription, when there is no easy way out, can conflict produce subordination and centralisation. The analogy with the digital present should not be literal, but it illuminates an important difference between two technological waves.

The first internet was experienced as expansion. Pages, forums, blogs, mailing lists, dispersed communities, open browsing. There was conflict, of course, but the territory seemed to be growing. The internet of platforms closed off a good part of that perimeter. Social, working, informational, affective and political life began to concentrate in a few private spaces of mass circulation.

And that perimeter has owners, few and with names. Meta concentrates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Alphabet owns YouTube. X belongs to Elon Musk. TikTok operates in the United States, since January 2026, under a US-majority joint venture —Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati fund MGX— shaped by the new US political and regulatory framework, with ByteDance reduced to less than twenty per cent. The concentration does not stop at the platforms. Great fortunes have also bought the press of reference. Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post in 2013; and the Ellison orbit, linked to Oracle in the TikTok deal, also holds a decisive position in Paramount Skydance, owner of CBS. The space in which public opinion is formed is not only circumscribed. It is in the hands of a handful of actors with their own interests and direct relations with political power.

In a circumscribed communicative space, conflict does not disperse in the same way. It accumulates. It intensifies. It becomes visible to publics that previously might never have met. Platforms join scales that were previously separate. Intimate conversation, public identity, the electoral campaign, entertainment, humiliation, consumption and professional reputation pass through similar infrastructures, sometimes through the same screen.

That closing of the perimeter helps to explain why the wave of the personal computer and the early web was more gradual and discreet in political terms, while the smartphone-networks-platforms wave produced a far more abrupt affective acceleration. It is not that there was no technology before. It is that the field was not equally concentrated, measured, optimised or appropriated.

Artificial intelligence enters at the end of this process, not at the beginning. It does not inaugurate the transformation, it industrialises it. If platforms turned conflict into engagement, AI turns engagement into automated political production.

It can generate slogans, images, replies, videos, segmentations, styles, cultural translations, simulations of closeness and infinite variations of a single grievance. It can adapt symbols to different publics without resolving their ambiguity. It can sustain artificially active communities. It can accelerate the manufacture of enemies and the personalisation of promises.

The danger is not only disinformation understood as falsehood. It is the continuous production of worlds habitable for grievance. Worlds where each person receives signals that their malaise has a shape, an enemy, a narrative and a leader.

What changed was not that politics discovered deceit, transgression or the symbol. What changed was the field in which those operations are rewarded. In the politics of Watergate, showing the backstage could destroy a presidency. In the politics of platforms, showing it can produce authenticity, belonging and electoral advantage. AI does not inaugurate that inversion. It industrialises it.

References

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business.

Bailey, F. G. (1969). Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Spanish ed.: Modernidad líquida. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002.

Carneiro, R. L. (1970). “A Theory of the Origin of the State”. Science, 169(3947), 733–738. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.169.3947.733

Goffman, E. (1956/1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre / New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Kertzer, D. I. (1988). Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rizzo, S., & Stella, G. A. (2007). La casta. Così i politici italiani sono diventati intoccabili. Milan: Rizzoli.

Sahlins, M. D. (1963). “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 285–303.

Wallace, A. F. C. (1956). “Revitalization Movements”. American Anthropologist, 58(2), 264–281. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1956.58.2.02a00040