If anything, the election of Donald Trump has made it clear that we're already in a world war, one playing out all around us.

Unlike state-sponsored hacking, which is often only detected well after the fact, this war is happening in real time and is plain to see. You yourself may be one of the fighters.

The global conflict is happening on social media, where the prolonged attack on Western democracy has emerged as the "Cyber Pearl Harbour" policymakers feared for years.

Every day, perceptions of political reality are shaped and manipulated.

A public, shaken by economic uncertainty, terrorism fears and a malaise about the future, is hoodwinked into supporting positions that run counter to the principles fundamental to successful democracies.

Worse, those who support democracy are unprepared and unorganised to deal with this onslaught.

One of the first things to realise is that the political power of social media is real. Studies show more engagement on social media correlated with election wins. Private sector businesses make similar findings.

Social media is also a great conduit for unreality. Columbia Journalism Review determined that online "audiences found their way to fake news via social media at a much higher rate than they did to real news."

Social media was crucial in the Brexit vote, Italy's constitutional referendum, the US presidential campaign and now in the French and German elections.

The platform erases national borders. It reshapes the political experience of voters and the public alike.

Campaigning and opinion-shaping are no longer limited to the people who live in the democracy having the election, either. This is an essential 21st-century reality that confronts all democracies.

Powerful technology marrying social media with big data analytics like that of Cambridge Analytica, used in the recent US election, can potentially alter the balance of elections and polls.

The interaction between bots, scripts, automated responses and real humans can influence voter behaviour, too.

So can the psychology that goes into efforts to motivate or just as likely frighten the online masses.

Famed 1960s media critic Marshall McLuhan said "a medium is not neutral - it does something to people". So it is with social media, which converts observers into participants.

Their collective activity increases the popularity of the topic, making it more likely for others online to encounter it. Social media galvanises like-minded people, reinforcing the kind of mob mentality pervasive on the platform.

In this realm, there is simply no middle or neutral ground, as regulators once ensured in the heyday of broadcast news.

For politics, audiences function more as fans, or even political armies. The partisans themselves create the political reality.

McLuhan, who coined the term "global village" to describe a world linked through electronic media, made an observation with particular relevance for social media today: when the mind is overloaded by facts, it reverts to myth to understand the world.

"Myth is an instantaneous grasp of a complex situation," McLuhan said. "Myth is instant. It takes in huge and complex factors in one image."

This helps explain how in this great global warfare, for many people, the myth they are arguing bypasses verifiable news and goes directly to their own experience in the economy and society.

Yes, it's true the middle and working classes have suffered because of globalisation. But no, it's not true that Jewish billionaire George Soros is a puppetmaster orchestrating their fate.

Yes, it's true mainstream political parties have been out of touch and slow to recognise the public's economic and political anxieties. But no, by and large, politicians are not plotting to introduce hordes of killer immigrants in a master plan for control of the domestic population.

But those who can tell a more resonant, mythic story - Make America Great Again, Take Back Control - will have an advantage in this globalised fight.

US-based film critic J. Hoberman is a long-time observer of the interplay of image and politics. Discussing Trump's victory, he wrote: "Using the principles of reality TV and the power of Twitter, Trump was able to create the spectacle and almost immediately annotate it to an audience of fans, just as Lady Gaga might address her 'monsters'.

"This powerful double spin offered a sense of community. No wonder people bought the illusion of straight talk and authenticity."

In this world, tweeting support for a candidate is not barracking from the seats but going down onto the pitch to take part in the contest.

This is the political reality of social media, which is not a fight over ideology as much as perception, with the meaning of recent history being a key battleground.

Unfortunately, those who battle on behalf of rules-based democracies seem to be faced with some structural disadvantages.

The first is culture. The embrace of deliberative, open discussion central to democratic debate is exploited by trolls. So is the fact that supporters of a liberal order instinctively look for common ground in political discussions.

The trolling culture, born of the internet, doesn't seek compromise but coercion. Trolls try to shut down targets online.

As the "rules of the internet", written for 4chan users sardonically state: "The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it."

As in traditional media, controversy and violence sell. Social media posts producing visceral reactions travel further, inciting fear and anger and changing the behaviour of those who see them.

If fear-inducing words can be paired with a political idea, they work better. Refugees are "rapefugees". Shifting demographics and immigration patterns, rather than an appropriate subject for political debate, are "White Genocide". First it's Brexit, then the nonsensical, succinct "DemExit".

In this war, "passion" runs far ahead of reason.

Another thing that puts believers in democracy at a disadvantage is that social media never arrives at a conclusion. In a court, in a newspaper or on the floor of a parliament, ideas can be argued and the argument can have a conclusion. In the era of TV news or newspapers, the production process created a snapshot of events, making it easier for all parties to agree on the basic facts.

In contrast, social media is a perpetual motion machine that never arrives at a conclusion. Nothing is settled. And if it is settled, it can always be reopened.

Finally, social media is in many ways an "attack-only" format. Trolls aren't rebuffed by superior arguments. They aren't dissuaded by stronger language. A superior argument is not a great deterrent. If you set out to tear down a person or idea online, all you need to do is continue to throw rhetorical bombs. You don't need to wait around to finish up arguments.

The attacker is rewarded both by the controversy they generate and the algorithms that reward their activity on the platform.

Often, the scale and intensity of their assaults is the key factor in whether a voice, idea, news or hashtag can be smothered online.

In fact one of the most effective ways of shaping a debate is to simply drown out an adversary's idea on social media with a surge of posts.

That's what happened in 2014, when Mexican activists started tweeting #YaMeCanse (I'm tired) in protest at the government's handling of the abduction of 43 students. After the term had trended for some time, tweets bearing the same hashtag but loaded with gibberish appeared, spoiling the use of the hashtag, which soon stopped trending.

During the earliest days of the Syrian conflict in 2011, a Bahrain-based company flooded Twitter with irrelevant or inappropriate posts to make the hashtag #Syria unusable, essentially sending up a smokescreen in the world's eyes.

As daunting as this moment is for democracy, there is some precedent for it.

In the early days of World War II the US Committee for National Morale, undertaking a study of totalitarian propaganda, concluded it "worked to divide the emotions from reason. It amplified the emotions and muted the voice of logic," writes Stanford University communications professor Fred Turner.

Meanwhile, democratic morale "worked to integrate the personality ... Democratic unity in turn could be found not in the unreasoning mass but in the voluntary gathering of independent individuals behind a single purpose".

Again, we live in a period when highly emotive social media works to split emotion from reason, and to divide societies from the inside.

It's a moment every bit as dangerous as the early days of World War II - but without the counterweight of hard geographic borders.

The war-era groups' awareness of the effect of totalitarian propaganda eventually led to a series of art and photo exhibitions and public messaging designed to emphasise a democratic mindset. These helped promote a public culture that successfully combated fascism and totalitarianism at home and around the world.

Being able to answer the challenges of totalitarianism helped guide Western democracies through the anxious early decades of the Cold War.

History suggests there is a way to make social media safe for democratic values in this global struggle. But right now, in this environment, democracy's supporters must recognise how dynamic this landscape is and how far behind they are.

Democracy's supporters must be willing not only to stand up but to confront people, organisations and technology that seek to undermine the legitimacy of nations ruled with the consent of their people.

If they do this, they can convert a moment of what looks like global pandemonium into something that has shape and form, something understandable by the democratic public.

Once that is done, the stability of democracy can once again compete on level ground against all the forces, movements and efforts set against it.

Follow Chris Zappone on Facebook