The politics of deliberate offence

Ragebait is no longer confined to social media. From Reform UK to Trump-era populism, modern politics increasingly runs on outrage, symbolism and emotional provocation. But if political attention is now driven by reaction, how do democratic societies resist becoming trapped inside permanent cycles of emotional manipulation?

Ragebaiting is something I, personally, employ in jest. As someone who enjoys mental acrobatics, especially with a capable opponent, and as a former law student, it is often something I use simply to wind somebody up. Usually harmlessly. A deliberately provocative argument here, an intentionally annoying point there. It gets conversation moving. It drags people into debate. Sometimes it even makes difficult conversations easier because annoyance is oddly easier to process than vulnerability.

As I sat down to write this article, I looked up the actual definition of ragebaiting and immediately felt a strange wave of guilt. Officially, it is defined as a tactic of manipulation designed to provoke outrage to drive engagement, attention, clicks, followers, or support. Usually associated with social media, it thrives on emotional reaction. The angrier people become, the more they interact. The more they interact, the more visible the content becomes. 

But the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that ragebaiting is no longer confined to the internet. It has become a political strategy.

Political actors increasingly make statements not because they are serious policy proposals, but because they know the reaction itself is politically useful. The outrage is not an unfortunate side effect. The outrage is the point.

Take Reform UK’s recent proposal to build migrant detention centres specifically in Green-held constituencies. The announcement was inflammatory by design. It was immediately condemned as grotesque, divisive, dangerous and performatively cruel. Which, of course, only amplified it further. 

And perhaps that is part of the reason this election cycle across the UK feels so unusually febrile. Scotland, Wales and England all head into major votes amid rising polarisation, collapsing trust in institutions and growing political fragmentation. Reform UK’s rise across all three nations has not simply come from policy detail or organisational strength, but from the ability to demonstrate emotional attention. Whether they ultimately overperform or underperform expectations electorally, they have already succeeded in shaping the tone of political conversation itself.

And yet the actual practicality of the proposal barely matters. There are huge constitutional, financial and legal obstacles to implementing anything remotely like it. The figures alone are absurd. Estimates suggest facilities on the scale proposed could cost billions. Even politically sympathetic commentators admitted it was more social media theatre than coherent policy. 

But that misses the point slightly. The proposal was not really designed as legislation. It was designed as provocation. 

The goal was to create a symbolic conflict between ‘ordinary people’ and political enemies. Green voters. Liberals. Human rights campaigners. Urban progressives. The proposal functions less as an immigration policy than as a cultural signal: these are the people we are going to annoy. 

Our briefing earlier this week described this dynamic as a politics of “at least punish my enemies”. If governments increasingly struggle to materially improve people’s lives, political actors can still offer emotional satisfaction through tribal conflict. If you cannot lower rent, raise wages or fix public services, you can at least promise to upset the people your voters already resent.

We see this most clearly in the U.S. Donald Trump’s support has often survived regardless of policy success because his appeal is not exclusively policy-based. For many supporters, he symbolically attacks the institutions and social groups they already feel alienated by. The performance itself becomes proof of loyalty. 

This is what “owning the libs” actually means. Not governing successfully, but successfully irritating the right people. And liberals, particularly online, repeatedly fall into the trap.

Every outrageous statement becomes a moral emergency. Every provocation triggers days of discourse, quote-tweets, think-pieces and outrage cycles. The political actor remains at the centre of attention while opponents exhaust themselves reacting emotionally to a spectacle deliberately engineered to provoke exactly that response. 

In many ways, modern politics increasingly resembles a competition over who can most effectively control the emotional temperature of the room. Outrage is no longer simply a reaction to politics. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which politics now functions.

At some point, you have to ask: if you know somebody is deliberately winding you up, why are you still letting them?

That does not mean indifference. Nor does it mean accepting harmful rhetoric. But there is a difference between strategic opposition and emotional capture. Increasingly, political discourse rewards whoever controls attention, not necessarily whoever has the strongest argument.

“Politics increasingly operates in the register of symbolism rather than administration. A proposal no longer needs to be workable to succeed politically. It only needs to communicate allegiance, grievance, identity or hostility effectively enough to energise supporters. ”

And attention is easiest to control through offence.

What makes this especially strange is that we seem to be entering an era where voters themselves increasingly understand this dynamic and yet still respond positively to it. I was speaking recently with somebody discussing the election who told me they were still planning to vote reform despite the implausibility of the detention centres.

But that is precisely the point. The statement was never primarily about implementation. It was about signalling. 

Politics increasingly operates in the register of symbolism rather than administration. A proposal no longer needs to be workable to succeed politically. It only needs to communicate allegiance, grievance, identity or hostility effectively enough to energise supporters. 

This is partly why debates around misinformation have become so complicated. Wales recently passed reforms intended to address deliberate deception and misinformation during elections, including provisions for future offences around false or misleading factual claims made by politicians. The intention is understandable. Public trust in politics is collapsing and many people feel political dishonesty has become entirely consequence-free.

But even here there are problems. Who decides what counts as misleading? What distinguishes exaggeration from deception? How do you regulate public dishonesty without accidentally criminalising political rhetoric itself?

The difficulty is that politics has always contained performance, spectacle and exaggeration. What has changed is the scale and speed with which emotional provocation now dominates public life. The internet has collapsed the distinction between politician, influencer, and entertainer. 

Modern politicians are no longer simply competing to govern. They are competing for attention with an information economy designed around emotional reaction. Calm competence struggles in a system built to reward outrage. And perhaps this is why deliberate offence now feels so pervasive. It is one of the few remaining political tools guaranteed to cut through public exhaustion. 

There is also something psychologically comforting about outrage. Anger creates clarity. It simplifies the world into heroes and enemies. It provides community. Shared offence becomes a form of identity formation. Entire political tribes now cohere less around shared policy goals than shared objects of resentment. 

Social media intensifies this further because outrage now functions socially as much as politically. Public anger performs loyalty to your tribe. Condemnation becomes a kind of participation. People increasingly experience politics less through institutions or policy outcomes and more through endless communal rituals of reactions.

But resentment is politically addictive and materially empty. Eventually, people still have to pay rent. They still need functioning healthcare systems. They still need decent jobs and public services. The theatre of cruelty can distract people for a surprisingly long time, but it cannot permanently substitute for governance. 

And this is where opponents of this style of politics often go wrong. Moral outrage alone is insufficient. If the entire political strategy relies on provoking emotional reaction, then endlessly reacting simply strengthens the performance. Sometimes, the most effective response is refusing to perform your assigned role in somebody else’s spectacle. 

For example, in our team meeting this week, it was suggested that if Reform wants detention centres, then perhaps progressives should propose “celebration of immigration centres” with police on every floor, ensuring everybody is extremely nice to each other at all times. It sounds ridiculous, but there is something useful underneath the joke. If politics increasingly operates symbolically, then perhaps the answer is not only condemnation, but counter-performance. Refusing despair. Refusing the emotional script entirely. 

Because deliberate offence only works if the offence controls you. 

And perhaps that is the strangest feature of modern politics: we are all now expected to become permanent emotional participants in spectacles specifically designed to exhaust us. The challenge is not simply resisting bad ideas. It is resisting the machinery of the reaction itself.

That may ultimately be one of the defining political questions of the next decade: how do democratic societies continue to argue passionately about real problems without becoming permanently trapped inside cycles of emotional manipulation?