Australia’s next class war may be fought over reality

Australia’s next class war may not principally be fought over wealth, but over truth.

For most of modern history, democratic societies have argued about competing interests: wages and profits; taxation and spending; and security and liberty, to name a few. Increasingly, our deepest disagreements are about who has the authority to establish what’s true.

The internet gave almost everyone the ability to publish. Social media gave almost anyone the possibility of reaching a mass audience. That democratisation of public debate is one of the great achievements of our age. But it has also transformed how authority is earned and challenged. Everyone having a microphone is a democratic achievement. Everyone believing their microphone makes them an authority is a democratic vulnerability.

This emerging divide cuts across traditional conceptions of class, education and occupation. Institutional authority has traditionally rested on credentials, professional norms, editorial processes and public accountability. Networked authority increasingly derives from authenticity, affinity, audience and visibility. Neither guarantees truth. An eyewitness with a phone may know more about an unfolding event than a credentialled expert thousands of kilometres away, and online commentators sometimes expose failures that established institutions overlook. The danger arises when situational knowledge becomes universal authority, popularity substitutes for evidence and follower counts become proxies for democratic legitimacy.

Research has long shown that people systematically overestimate how widely others share their beliefs, a cognitive bias known as the false-consensus effect. More recent experimental and observational research indicates that social media can amplify this bias by exposing users to disproportionately like-minded content and visible signals of agreement, although the effects are generally modest and vary across platforms and users. Personalised algorithms intensify that tendency by exposing users disproportionately to people who think as they do. An audience can gradually become an imagined constituency, that constituency an assumed majority, and that assumed majority an expectation that governments ought to implement its preferred policies. When democratic institutions produce different outcomes, political disappointment can be reinterpreted as evidence that those institutions no longer represent the people.

That creates fertile ground for conspiratorial reasoning. The issue isn’t believing that conspiracies exist, but rather assuming that aligned interests necessarily demonstrate hidden coordination or that every unwelcome outcome must have a single underlying cause. Complex events are increasingly explained through recurring master narratives. On parts of the populist left, billionaires, Washington, corporations and captured media become the recurring explanation for otherwise unrelated events. On parts of the populist right, globalists, bureaucracies, universities and progressive elites perform much the same function. Different villains produce remarkably similar reasoning, and contrary evidence is increasingly interpreted as proof that the system is hiding the truth.

Liberal democracy depends on something far more fragile than agreement. Democracies function because citizens broadly accept the legitimacy of the institutions through which disagreements are resolved. Political scientists describe this as losers’ consent: today’s losers accept defeat because they believe they remain participants in a system that allows them to become tomorrow’s winners. Democracy means everyone gets a say. It doesn’t mean everyone gets their way. Political influence has never been distributed perfectly, and inequalities of wealth, organisation and access deserve constant scrutiny. But those imperfections don’t mean that every unwelcome decision is evidence of institutional capture or democratic failure.

The consequences are visible in foreign and security policy. The United States has made catastrophic strategic mistakes and has often exercised power coercively. That deserves rigorous scrutiny but doesn’t erase China’s economic coercion against Australia, aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea or the strategic ambitions of other authoritarian powers. Equally, recognising Chinese coercion doesn’t make every critic of AUKUS or US strategy a Beijing apologist. Democracies require citizens capable of applying the same evidentiary standards to allies, competitors and themselves.

The strategic implications extend beyond domestic political debate. Foreign interference is most effective where trust has already begun to fracture. Adversaries needn’t persuade Australians that their worldviews are correct if they can persuade Australians that no domestic institution deserves confidence. Existing grievances, institutional failures and conspiratorial explanations can be magnified until citizens increasingly distrust governments, media, experts and one another. The most effective information operation may no longer be ‘believe us’, but simply ‘don’t believe them’.

The answer is neither renewed deference to established institutions nor wholesale rejection of them. Professional journalism, governments and experts make mistakes and should be challenged vigorously. Equally, online popularity isn’t evidence of expertise, truth or democratic representation. The relevant distinction is whether claims can be tested, challenged and corrected, and whether those making them can be held accountable. Healthy democracies require trust proportionate to evidence, not blind institutional faith or reflexive institutional cynicism.

Australia enters this contest with significant strengths: compulsory voting, robust electoral institutions, an independent electoral commission and resilient democratic norms. This shouldn’t breed complacency. Democracy ultimately depends on citizens accepting three uncomfortable possibilities: that they might be wrong, that opponents can disagree in good faith, and that losing a political argument doesn’t mean democracy has failed.

The old class war asked who controlled the means of production. The emerging epistemic divide asks how democratic societies determine whom to trust. If Australians lose confidence that disagreement can be honest, that evidence can change minds, and that institutions can legitimately produce outcomes they dislike, political defeat becomes increasingly inexplicable without conspiracy. That’s a problem of democratic legitimacy and, ultimately, national resilience.