The theatre of opposition

Turn on any device and witness the fury. Pundits clash across split screens, influencers stake out opposing territories in the cultural war. The air vibrates with disagreement, the algorithms pulse with engagement, the comment sections burn with righteous anger. Democracy in action, we tell ourselves. The marketplace of ideas at its most vital.

Look closer and the choreography becomes visible. The same voices cycling through the same positions, performing disagreement within carefully maintained boundaries. The theatre of opposition requires both sides to show up, to play their parts, to generate heat without too much light. The debates rage fiercely about everything except the stage itself, the script, the economic interests funding the production.

Like a wrestling match where the conflict is choreographed for entertainment. The opponents may genuinely dislike each other, but they're following a script that serves the promoters. Real political theatre works similarly: the drama is genuine, but it operates within boundaries that serve existing power structures.

We mistake performance for participation, spectacle for democracy. The citizen becomes audience member, watching others disagree on their behalf. The disagreement feels real because the emotions are real, the investment genuine, the identity stakes high. We choose our side in the manufactured drama and defend it with the passion of people who believe they're fighting for something that matters.

Meanwhile, actual dissent disappears into the margins, drowned out by the amplified voices claiming to represent it. The community group blocking the development project gets no airtime while celebrity activists debate housing policy on panel shows. The workers organising for better conditions remain invisible while business leaders and think tank experts argue about labour relations on prime time. The communities creating mutual aid networks get no coverage while economists debate poverty on news programmes.

The manufacture of dissent serves the same masters as the manufacture of consent. Both create the illusion of democratic participation while concentrating actual power in fewer hands. Consent manufactures agreement where there should be questioning. Dissent manufactures division where there could be solidarity. Together they create a closed loop of fake participation that exhausts people's political energy on shadow boxing.

The creation of apparent grassroots opposition that actually serves elite interests. Like funding environmental groups that focus on individual carbon footprints while ignoring corporate pollution, or promoting culture war debates that distract from economic inequality.

A concept from Walter Lippmann and later Noam Chomsky describing how media and institutions shape public opinion to support elite interests, making it seem like people freely choose to agree with policies that may not serve them.

Fighting an opponent who isn't really there. In politics, this means putting enormous energy into debates that don't threaten existing power structures, while real alternatives remain invisible and unfunded.

Real opposition emerges in the gaps the mainstream debate ignores. Real alternative solutions only pose a genuine threat when they refuse to play by the established rules entirely.

The system doesn't fear disagreement within its boundaries. It fears people walking away from the boundaries themselves. It fears communities that stop arguing about which politician to vote for and start governing themselves. It fears conversations that move beyond left versus right toward what comes after both. It fears silence more than noise, refusal more than anger, indifference more than engagement.

But walking away isn't available to everyone equally. Some people are trapped in the systems being debated, dependent on the outcomes of the manufactured conflicts. The immigration debate isn't academic when you're waiting for a visa. The healthcare debate isn't theoretical when you're rationing medication. The education debate isn't abstract when it's your child's school being cut. The luxury of opting out of manufactured dissent is itself manufactured, available mainly to those with enough resources to create alternatives.

Perhaps the task is learning to distinguish performance from practice, spectacle from substance, manufactured positions from emergent possibilities. To recognise when we're being invited to take sides in someone else's drama and when we're being called to write new scripts entirely. To notice the difference between arguing about the world as it is and experimenting with the world as it could be.

The theatre of opposition needs our attention to survive. Our clicks, our shares, our outrage, our investment in outcomes we cannot control. Without our participation, the show loses its audience, the drama loses its power, the manufactured positions collapse back into the interests they were designed to serve.

What grows in the silence after the applause? What conversations become possible when the cameras turn off? What forms of collective action emerge when people stop performing disagreement and start practising alternatives?

The real debate isn't happening on the stage. It's happening in the communities creating their own answers to questions the mainstream debate isn't even asking. Here, away from the spotlights and the sound bites, different possibilities take root in the fertile ground of actual practice rather than performed opposition.