Britannia leaps into the dark — repurposing John Tenniel ‘s comment on the 1867 Reform Act. Tenniel also was the illustrator for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Wikimedia Commons.
“Political Science is an oxymoron”?
Brexit is not just about the UK. It is about the US as well not just because it will affect the US economy and foreign relations, but also because the forces that drove Brexit are also roiling our politics and society. Shocked at the unexpected UK vote to leave the EU, commentators are wondering whether we will also be shocked to wake up after election day to a Trump victory. Even Larry Summers drew this lesson from the upset:
“After Brexit, Trump, Sanders and the misforecast British and Canadian general elections, it should be clear that the term political science is an oxymoron. Political events cannot be reliably predicted by pollsters, pundits or punters. All three groups should have humility going forward. In particular no one should be confident about the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”
In my comments on Brexit, I don’t need to add, “and this reflects on the US also.”
UKIP poster showing refugees and migrants entering Slovenia. A fleet of 10 vans carried the poster around London.
Did racism decide the referendum?
“The unspeakable became not only speakable, but commonplace.” Everyone knew that Nigel Farage, the head of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) had long appealed to anti-immigrant racism to mobilize support, but the “Breaking Point” poster was not a breaking point for the other leaders of the campaign, the “respectable” Leavers. It was easy for them to say, “That’s UKIP, we’re not like that. We talk about immigration quite differently.”
But those “respectable” Leave campaign leaders had their own racist posters, such as this one, below, showing an EU passport as an open door for Turkey.
Farage made immigration the “defining issue” of the poll (BBC News). In particular, the Leave campaign stoked fears that Turkey would join the EU and gain unlimited freedom to enter the UK.
Leave campaign poster: The EU passport as an open door for 76 million coming from Turkey.
Cartoon in UK’s second largest circulation newspaper, the Daily Mail. 11/17/15.
There are non-racist reasons for concern about immigration, but racism is increasingly widespread and stoked by a section of the political establishment and by mainstream media. Leave campaign spokesman Michael Gove, the UK’s Conservative justice minister, warned that EU accession of Turkey and four other countries (with Muslim populations!) would add a population the size of Scotland’s and break the National Health Service.
Anti-immigrant demonstration in Newcastle. Image: Twitter.
One journalist counted 100 racist incidents two days after the campaign ended; people thought to be “foreign” were harassed in the streets; homes and cultural centers targeted with graffiti and flyers; more ranting on social media; increases in racist chatter on right wing websites. … Especially worrisome: hate speech and harassment in public,with passersby joining in. Obviously not everywhere, but clearly people felt they could publicly express rage that they previously had to hold inside. Racist campaigns lend legitimacy to racist messaging, normalize racist talk, and give license to hate crimes. Many voters thought a Leave vote meant the foreign-born would be expelled, and some people took steps to rush the process. This is not the tolerant Britain that so many British thought they had.
But while there was this heavy racist component in the anti-immigration politics, it is a mistake to reduce all the anger to racism. Identity politics is never about just one identity; people are not so simple. (This applies to Trump supporters also.) “Intersectionality” does not only describe people we like, how they identify and are oppressed in multiple ways. National identity is strong, but there is also working class identity, political party identity, and regional identity. It was “English” identity, more than “British” identity at work; English identity is in some forms traditional, conservative, yearning for an imagined lost past. But the yearning is not just for a culturally homogeneous white Britain; polls show that most Britons, even in the middle class, identify as working class, and there is a yearning for a working class way of life eroded by deindustrialization and cuts to the social welfare system, a yearning awash in resentment of elites. Rejection of the EU was charged with all that feeling.
“It’s not the economy, stupid!” (Or, not just the economy).
The Remain campaign of the Conservatives reduced all questions to economics. Chancellor George Osborne: Vote to leave and there will be a recession, vote to leave and it will raise your taxes, vote to leave and we will have to cut the National Health Service, schools, the police, the military. But while the Leave campaign began with economic arguments, it then focused more on immigration.
And yet Leave voters were not just thinking about their income. They cared about their way of life, they were bitter and furious at their rulers, they wanted more democracy, they wanted to push back against immigration. They were globalization’s losers, but the loss of jobs is not just about money. They were wronged, they were assaulted, they were robbed, they wanted fairness. Justice is a totalizing demand, injustice a totalizing grievance.
Brecht on Brexit: “Justice is the bread of the people.”
But if the economy is so strong, what are they angry about?
“The economy” is an ideologically charged term, a political construction. Finance Minister George Osborne says, Those Leave voters are just wrong to think they are doing badly, because the UK economy is “strong.” It has been strong in London, but it was not strong for the unemployed, underemployed, low wage Brexit voters in the north. When Osborne says that people will do better in the EU, he should more accurately say: Some people only, and the others don’t matter. In the best of times since the seventies, the elites saw economic “good times” in the rising GDP. But GDP is an aggregate; while it felt very good to bankers, poverty increased, the working class lost the well-paid manufacturing jobs, and the middle class was “hollowed out,” And when you are told about “job growth” and the fall in the unemployment rate, you’re not told how many of those jobs pay a living wage.
Democracy: Too serious a matter to be left to the people
They wish they didn’t have that referendum!
“The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more. It has pushed the nations and communities of Britain apart, not brought them together. It has allowed a bad press to behave even more irresponsibly. After what we have experienced in the past month, we need political reform more than ever. But the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.” (Martin Kettle, in the Guardian.)
Bitter remorse and blaming each other, all over the Remain camp and the political establishment. And so again our wise men teach us that Democracy is too serious a business to be left to the people: Referendums are not such a good idea. We can see a lot of this talk, among progressives as well as conservatives. If you blame the result on the Leave campaign’s lies, demagoguery, incitement of racism, it’s a short step to saying this: The people are gullible, ignorant, stupid; they are suckers for the lying and manipulation by demagogues who exploit their prejudices and fears. I’m not exaggerating — there is plenty of this kind of talk.
If you believe the people were hoodwinked, then maybe you think their decision can be ignored or overturned. After all, they weren’t acting in their own best interest, and, after all, that’s what their leaders care about! And we’re reminded that “the vast majority” of the people’s elected representatives are against leaving the EU. It is permissible for the political leaders to speculate about a second referendum, or Parliament declaring it is not bound by the referendum, or making a deal with the EU and staying in, and if any of that happens, watch to see it done in the name of democracy.
The Labour Party has another democracy problem. Its elected MPs (members of parliament), nearly all centrists, hate its recently elected party leader, radical leftist Jeremy Corbyn. But Corbin was elected in a landslide which saw the mobilization of thousands and thousands of new party members — another of those anti-establishment “populist” upsurges we now know so well in the US. Leading Labour MPs called on Corbyn to resign and are organizing for membership vote to replace him, and may even try to use Labour Party rules to prevent him from running in the election. All in the name of democracy — true, party members elected him, but the party represents all of the UK; Corbyn only has a mandate from Labour’s membership, not from the MPs, who are thinking about the rest of the people. Democracy for the leaders, obedience for the rest of us.
Here comes the second Brecht quote (well, paraphrase): The people have lost the confidence of the government — it is time for the government to dissolve the people and elect another.
Crisis of legitimacy, collapse of the center
Since I’m still quoting poets, I’m allowed to resort to cliché — “The center cannot hold.” We are in economic, political, cultural crisis, and such totalizing crises bring with them a collapse of the center. Centrist parties and forces are losing their hold on voters; Trump and Sanders here, Brexit there, right-wing resurgences and left-wing strikes and occupations throughout Europe from Greece to France to Netherlands. Politics abhors a vacuum, and so when the center implodes, movements of the left and right rush in.
“Extremes” were familiar and found elsewhere in Europe, but it was a shock to see the collapse in the UK. What happened to that “stiff upper lip”? The majority Conservative Party is in political limbo: Prime Minister David Cameron resigned, the party is split between Leave and Remain forces. No one is really in charge, people speculate about who will be.
As for Labour, the failure of the Remain campaign gave centrist, Blairite forces in the party — virtually all of the Labour MPs — an opportunity to challenge Jeremy Corbyn, discounting the p0pularity of his “hard leftism” (for “hard leftism,” read: his very popular rejection of neoliberalism). They blame him for the Leave victory because he was too sympathetic to the exit from EU that most people wanted.
The political principle is clear: The ruling classes need voters to bless them with legitimacy. When they can’t get the voters to behave properly, they are faced with distasteful options: 1. Keep pretending representative democracy still represents, when the people more and more openly show their contempt for their “representatives”; 2. resort more and more to open repression; or, 3. more horrible than any other option, redistribute some of that wealth and power and plan to get it back in a decade or two.
Unthinkable.
