Politics in the Age of Public Humiliation

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 27 August 2026

There was once an unspoken bargain involved in entering public life. A politician surrendered a substantial measure of his privacy, submitted his opinions to criticism and accepted that his professional mistakes might be exposed before millions of people. In return he received the opportunity to participate in government, to argue for causes in which he believed and, if sufficiently talented and fortunate, to leave some imprint upon the history of his country. It was never an easy bargain. Politics has always been cruel. Yet something important has changed. The modern politician is no longer merely criticised. He is liable to be publicly emasculated: stripped of dignity, reduced to a collection of embarrassing fragments, mocked for his appearance and mannerisms, pursued through his family and private life and subjected to a permanent electronic referendum upon his worth as a human being.

This phenomenon is damaging not principally because politicians deserve sympathy. Some do and some do not. It matters because of the effect upon the people who decide whether to become politicians in the first place.

The old press could be savage. British political history alone supplies innumerable examples. Cartoonists exaggerated noses, stomachs and bald heads. Newspaper proprietors pursued vendettas. Private scandals destroyed careers. Parliamentary debate itself could be extraordinarily personal. Yet there were practical limitations upon the machinery of humiliation. A newspaper appeared once or perhaps twice a day. Television news occupied a limited number of hours. Letters to the editor were selected by editors. Most angry members of the public complained about politicians to their families or in the pub.

The smartphone abolished these limitations.

Every politician now carries in his pocket a device through which thousands or millions of strangers may address him continuously. Every speech can be clipped. Every facial expression can become a meme. A stumble over a word may be replayed millions of times. An ill-judged sentence delivered at 10.17 in the morning may have become a national controversy by lunchtime. A photograph taken at an unfortunate angle can acquire a political significance wholly unrelated to anything the politician has actually done.

Social media have therefore accomplished something paradoxical. They have democratised political speech while simultaneously making democratic politics less hospitable to many of the people we might most want to practise it.

The problem should not be confused with legitimate scrutiny. Politicians exercise power and ought to be scrutinised more intensively than private citizens. Corruption should be exposed. Lies should be identified. Incompetence should be reported. Policies should be subjected to merciless intellectual criticism. A society in which politicians were insulated from such things would rapidly become authoritarian.

Yet scrutiny and humiliation are different activities. Asking whether a minister’s policy will work is scrutiny. Constructing an endless compilation of the minister looking foolish is entertainment. Investigating whether a politician has abused public money serves democracy. Searching twenty years of photographs to discover an embarrassing costume at a university party may not. Challenging a politician’s argument is political debate. Sending thousands of messages about his body, wife, husband, children, voice, hair, sexuality or supposed personal inadequacies is something else altogether.

Online political culture has blurred these distinctions.

There is empirical reason to take the problem seriously. Research examining millions of messages sent during the 2019 British general election found rising levels of online hostility towards candidates and noted that a record number of politicians had cited abuse as a reason for deciding not to seek re-election. More recent research likewise describes insults, threats and offensive comments as increasingly routine features of politicians’ online lives. A 2025 discussion of research concerning British MPs reported that, among 188 MPs surveyed, 83 per cent had experienced abusive language or insults, 37 per cent threats of harm and 27 per cent death threats.

That is not a normal occupational environment.

Nevertheless the more subtle problem is not what happens to politicians once elected. It is selection.

Imagine two people considering entering politics.

The first is professionally accomplished, financially comfortable, happily married and respected by colleagues. She has built a reputation over twenty years. She has children at school. She could conceivably become an excellent legislator or minister.

The second has spent his adult life seeking attention. He enjoys confrontation. He possesses an unusually thick skin. He regards notoriety as success and has little reputation outside politics to lose.

Which of these two people is more likely to look at contemporary political life and say: this is for me?

This is the central danger. A political culture organised around humiliation may systematically select for precisely those personalities least vulnerable to humiliation.

Economists have even described a related theoretical phenomenon as the “media scrutiny paradox”: scrutiny can improve political quality by identifying unsuitable candidates but, where scrutiny imposes large privacy and reputational costs while conveying relatively little useful information about competence, it can also discourage high-quality candidates who have substantial reputations to lose.

The implications are uncomfortable. We frequently complain that politicians are narcissistic, shameless, combative, excessively ambitious and addicted to publicity. But these may increasingly be occupational adaptations. We have constructed an entrance examination for political life in which one of the principal tests is the willingness to endure mass ridicule. Then we express surprise at the personalities who pass it.

The phenomenon affects men and women differently, although neither sex escapes it. Women in politics encounter a particularly grotesque mixture of sexual commentary, judgments about appearance, threats and attacks involving family life. Experimental research is appropriately cautious about claiming that witnessing abuse invariably deters ordinary citizens from politics: some studies find little general deterrent effect. But there is evidence that sexist online abuse can specifically reduce women’s political ambition, while politicians themselves report significant consequences from abusive online environments.

Men undergo a different sort of ritual degradation. Contemporary political rhetoric frequently attacks masculinity itself. Male politicians are mocked as weak, short, fat, bald, effeminate, sexually inadequate, cowardly or dominated by their wives. Photographs are selected to make them appear ridiculous. Their voices and gestures are imitated. The object is frequently not to demonstrate that their policies are wrong but to establish that they are pathetic.

Hence the word emasculation is appropriate in a broader sense. Modern media culture repeatedly seeks to deprive public figures of the dignity upon which authority traditionally depends.

Television contributed to this process long before social media. Political broadcasting increasingly became entertainment. The successful politician needed not merely to understand economics, foreign affairs or public administration but to perform convincingly beneath studio lights. A hesitation that might indicate intellectual caution could look like weakness. A complicated answer could be represented as evasion. Someone capable of administering a government department might nevertheless appear disastrous in a thirty-second television exchange.

Social media has taken this logic vastly further because it eliminates context.

A parliamentary speech lasting twenty minutes becomes a twelve-second clip. An interview containing fifteen sensible answers and one foolish one becomes the foolish answer. Algorithms have no particular interest in constitutional government. They reward engagement and humiliation generates engagement extraordinarily efficiently. Anger does too.

The result is a political information market in which the emotionally outrageous tends to defeat the merely important. A politician explaining pension reform cannot easily compete with a video apparently showing another politician forgetting where he is. An intelligent discussion of defence procurement cannot compete with somebody falling over.

Nor can politicians simply abstain. Social media has become integral to campaigning and political communication, providing direct access to voters without the mediation of traditional news organisations. Candidates therefore inhabit platforms whose incentives may simultaneously require their presence and corrode their dignity.

There is another consequence. Politicians begin adapting their behaviour to the expectation that everything may be weaponised.

They speak in prepared phrases. They avoid speculative thinking. They become reluctant to admit uncertainty. They conceal changes of mind. They hesitate to display humour because jokes can be decontextualised. They avoid intellectual experimentation because an unfinished thought can become permanent evidence against them.

This is disastrous for serious government.

Intelligent people change their minds. Intelligent people occasionally say, “I don’t know.” Intelligent people explore possibilities before reaching conclusions. Yet the modern political communications environment punishes precisely these habits. The safest politician is therefore one who says almost nothing spontaneously and repeats approved formulations until everyone is bored.

We then complain that politicians sound robotic.

There is also an important distinction between criticism directed upwards and mass intimidation directed sideways. A powerful newspaper exposing a Prime Minister’s misconduct is exercising a traditional democratic function. Ten thousand anonymous accounts descending upon an obscure councillor because a thirty-second video has gone viral is something quite different. The imbalance of power may actually favour the crowd.

The consequences extend to families. The traditional politician chose public life; his children did not. Yet spouses and children can now find photographs, addresses, schools and personal histories circulated amongst strangers. Political disagreement can metastasise into threats against people who never stood for election at all. Campaign research has found that candidates and staff consider online incivility not merely a reputational nuisance but also a problem involving security and psychological wellbeing.

For a prospective politician with a successful alternative career, the calculation becomes increasingly irrational. Why surrender a comfortable professional life for lower income, less privacy, uncertain employment and the possibility that strangers will spend years telling your children that their father or mother is evil?

The people most likely to answer yes may increasingly be those who value power or celebrity so intensely that ordinary deterrents cease to operate.

Therein lies the democratic tragedy.

We need capable politicians precisely because government has become extraordinarily complicated. Modern ministers must understand artificial intelligence, nuclear deterrence, monetary policy, biotechnology, energy markets, demographic decline, cyber warfare and international finance. No individual can master all these subjects, but governments desperately require intelligent generalists capable of absorbing technical advice and exercising judgment.

Yet many people possessing precisely these qualities have attractive alternatives. They can become academics, entrepreneurs, lawyers, engineers, doctors, financiers or executives. They can earn more money and suffer vastly less abuse.

Politics competes for talent.

If we make the profession sufficiently disgusting, politics will lose that competition.

There are no easy remedies. Regulation of political speech presents obvious dangers. Politicians must never acquire a general power to suppress criticism on the ground that it is unpleasant. Satire is an essential democratic tradition and sometimes ridicule punctures pomposity more effectively than a thousand editorials.

Nor should we romanticise the politicians of the past. Earlier generations contained crooks, fools, alcoholics, philanderers and egomaniacs in abundance. The argument is not that politics once consisted entirely of philosopher-kings.

Rather the technological environment has changed the price of public service.

Part of the remedy must therefore be cultural rather than legal. Editors might ask whether a story reveals something about fitness for office or merely satisfies curiosity. Broadcasters might resist converting every political disagreement into gladiatorial entertainment. Social-media companies can distinguish threats and organised harassment from robust disagreement without becoming arbiters of legitimate political opinion. Citizens themselves might rediscover the distinction between saying that a politician is wrong and declaring him worthless as a human being.

Politicians have responsibilities too. They have helped create this environment. Parties operate online attack machines. Politicians ridicule opponents, circulate humiliating clips and encourage supporters to treat politics as tribal warfare. Research on online political fragmentation provides good reason not to attribute every pathology of digital politics to journalists alone: politicians and parties themselves are important participants in constructing the online political environment.

Those who live by humiliation should hardly be surprised when they are humiliated.

Nevertheless democracy ultimately depends upon an unfashionable concept: dignity. Not reverence and certainly not immunity from criticism, but the proposition that somebody may be profoundly mistaken without being contemptible.

Politics requires disagreement between people who must afterwards continue governing the same country.

The danger of our contemporary culture of public emasculation is therefore greater than hurt feelings among ministers and legislators. It changes the sort of people willing to become ministers and legislators. It rewards the shameless, the exhibitionistic and the fanatical while imposing particularly heavy costs upon people possessing families, professions and reputations they understandably wish to protect.

A society cannot endlessly degrade its political class and then complain about the quality of the people attracted to politics.

If every candidate must consent to having his face mocked, his family investigated, his youthful mistakes excavated, his body ridiculed, his words clipped into misleading fragments and thousands of strangers invited to pronounce upon his moral worth, then eventually sensible people will draw the obvious conclusion.

They will do something else.

And when the decent, capable and reflective decide that political life is beneath them, the vacancies will not remain empty.

They will be filled by the people who do not mind.