There are broadly three ways to react to the shifting of the Overton window – the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The first and most common is to move along with it, accepting new parameters and adapting to them. The second is to stay put but look through the window, acknowledging that things have changed while attempting to grapple with that. The third is to resist the movement altogether, to refuse to engage with any previously beyond-the pale-ideas, and reject any arguments to do so.
I tend to fall into the third camp, an Overton window refusenik. This is not fashionable and it’s not easy – by the very nature of the problem, people who agree with you become more desensitised with each passing day. There comes a point when seeing Nigel Farage on TV becomes no longer appalling but almost comforting. It’s old Nigel again with his familiar voice and manner, and bluster and cackle – an offence of white noise.
It’s like watching the weather report and listening to the predictable chatter. Familiarity doesn’t only breed contempt, sometimes it just breeds more familiarity. I used to turn off Farage’s LBC radio show the moment it started, in a spasm of irritation. I don’t any more. Not because I’m interested in anything he has to say, but out of sheer conditioning. I let him witter on in the background, like The Archers or the Shipping Forecast.
This is the danger of ubiquity, it just erodes an ability to be discerning. No matter how much those with regressive, prejudiced or simply dishonest views are challenged, it is pointless if they are constantly provided a venue. It is the platform that legitimises them, not how they perform when they are on that platform.
And so forgive me if I do not join in the celebration of Andrew Neil vanquishing the American conservative personality Ben Shapiroon the BBC’s Politics Live. It was certainly fun to watch Shapiro flounder outside the comfort of the US political interview echo chamber. The video gave us such gems as Shapiro accusing Neil of being a biased leftwing journalist, which tickled even Neil who laughed in genuine (and telling) mirth at the allegation. Unable to cope with Neil simply stating his own words back to him, Shapiro riposted: “I’m popular, and no one’s ever heard of you,” before terminating the interview.
His statement might sound childish, but he does have more than 2 million Twitter followers and 600,000 YouTube subscribers, and his videos rack up millions of views. According to the editor of Politics Live, Shapiro – who has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”, whose Twitter account was checked by the Quebec mosque gunman 93 times in the month preceding the shooting, and who says that the majority of Muslims are radicals – was hosted on the BBC because “he has millions of followers on social media and is hugely influential, particularly among young people worldwide”.
Shapiro’s currency isn’t his ability to debate or his intellectual credentials, it is merely to be around so much that his very ubiquity becomes ersatz success. It is the tactic of others in his tribe, to build such a profile online that mainstream news organisations fall for the optical illusion and eventually give them passage to respectability. Interviews in which they are challenged, successfully or not, are part of their roadshow. They either, according to them, prove the media’s bad faith or bias, or present their exchanges as entertaining sports events after which there are losers and winners and rematches. The content of their message becomes secondary, its seriousness trivialised. After the interview, Shapiro tweeted that it was “Neil 1, Shapiro 0”.
In the post-match analysis, even when we celebrate if interviews go well and people such as Shapiro are not merely indulged but pressed, we are somehow soiled by becoming a part of the whole seedy spectacle. Exhilarated by the performance, mocking Shapiro’s voice or cartoonish demeanour, laughing as he storms off. It’s not funny. Shapiro was minimised and made to look a fool, but he managed not to substantively answer any of they questions he was asked, about his stance on abortion, Arabs or Palestinians. This is not because Neil is a bad interviewer, but because there is no way to effectively nail someone like Shapiro whose argumentative tactics are about aggression, evasion, rhetorical bluster and dissimulation.
Farage is the same. He has been skewered on his lies several times, often by his own radio phone-in callers, and most recently on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, but it’s not relevant to his profile.
The belief that somehow giving more airtime to people will expose and vanquish them makes no sense. The whole “sunlight is the best disinfectant” argument no longer works. Sunlight simply provides exposure and nourishment. There is no middle ground with bigots, no matter how popular they are. With every attempt at “challenging” them, all we do is expand their stage that little bit more.