Brexit: Why they lost

Some of this is interesting, especially the substantive point that when Tony Blair (who on every important issue was John Major's pupil rather than his adversary) and his creepy cultural commissars tried to redraw the political map along ethical rather than pragmatic lines they made the mistake of de-legitimizing their opposition.

With the advent of the third way in the 1990s, it became fashionable in some quarters to declare that the adversarial model of politics was now obsolete – so categories of right and left were no longer needed. But even the champions of a post-political consensus cannot avoid drawing a frontier between themselves and their rivals. Since they refuse to draw it in an adversarial way, they create a moral divide, which does not permit a true agonistic debate. Tony Blair pitted the modernisers against the traditionalists; for Emmanuel Macron, the frontier is between the progressives and the conservatives.

[Chantal Mouffe in The Guardian, 'Centrist politics will not defeat Boris Johnson’s rightwing populism'] 

The result of this de-legitimization was a subsequent total lack of debate about a whole series of crucially important matters, from life issues to mass immigration to the hunting ban to gay marriage.
In the end of course the Left lost the Brexit vote mainly because they'd co-opted the European Union to the same cause as Sunday shopping and sodomy for teenagers. No attempt was made at any point to sell either a different vision of Europe (whether Christian, classical or ethnic) or to placate the opposition that had taken up the Euro-sceptic cause by conceding any ground at all on any single issue. We were simply told that we were "racist" and we were standing against the tide of history.

And in the end most people decided they'd had enough. They'd had enough of "cultural change". They'd had enough of being called "nostalgics" and "bigots" and "Little Englanders". They'd had enough of having their noses rubbed in it.

(But yes, the idea that the Left can stop populism now simply by having a "green new deal" does seem quite silly.)

Are liberals going mad?

For once, I'm not just using the word 'mad' as a political term of abuse. One of the most common sorts of "madness" is simple cognitive dissonance. It occurs when something happens that challenges one of someone's deeply (and indeed sincerely) held beliefs. It's the psychological equivalent of an unstoppable force striking an immovable object. In the most extreme cases it can result in literal hallucinations. More commonly though, the subject will simply start grasping for rationalizations for why something that of course cannot be the case seemingly is the case. And of course this is something that we all do most of the time, and sometimes we do it without even realizing it. The greater the trauma the greater the challenge to one's view of reality, and the more deeply and sincerely held the the belief the more pressing the need for a satisfying explanation.

And if an explanation is not forthcoming, or if it is not sufficiently "satisfying"... well, nature abhors a vacuum.

By 'satisfying' of course I don't just mean intellectually or logically satisfying "on the facts". If a great man is suddenly and publicly murdered (such as JFK, MLK, RFK, etc.) then there's an immediate and instinctive feeling than a lone gunman (Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan) with an obscure motive (thinking Kennedy was a "fascist", a desire for fame, the younger Kennedy's support for arms to Israel) just won't do as an explanation. And thus the 1960s generation had a strong psychological need for the 1960s assassinations to be political killings and for their victims to be martyrs for civil rights. And so the men who actually killed them had to be either patsies or involved in vast, right-wing conspiracies.

In the last couple of years of course similar things have happened with Trump and Brexit. And although the Trump conspiracy theories (i.e. Trump is a Russian secret agent and Russia rigged the election to make him President) have been largely debunked, the Brexit theories are still mutating and multiplying beautifully. Stephen Daisley in The Spectator recently wrote about 'Brexit and the great liberal crack-up'.

Liberals – or at least some of them – have gone quite mad over Brexit. There is almost no intrigue they will not seize on if it might explain away the last three years. 

TV historian Dan Snow tweeted a photograph of his postal ballot and the Brexit Party leaflet he claimed had been delivered inside the same envelope. When celebrity Twitter flicks on its blue-tick sirens, craven officialdom comes running but they brought bad news.

Snow’s local council released a statement saying postal votes were handled internally and double-checked; it was ‘very unlikely’ that Brexit Party literature could have arrived in the same envelope. ‘Rather,’ they said with no little diplomacy of phrasing, ‘it is likely that the leaflet was delivered on or around the same day as the postal voting pack, which is how this misunderstanding may have arisen’. 

Snow’s initial tweet racked up 3,500 retweets; his follow-up, admitting ‘a prank or incompetence on my part’ was likely to blame, managed a mere 300.

Snow’s flakery is far from isolated. Brexit angst is driving liberals to take positions they would have recognised as reactionary and illogical not so long ago. Decrying the BBC has become de rigueur in a way once confined to Tory conference fringes and mad academic symposiums on Zionist control of the media. Some remainers have convinced themselves the Corporation is pushing not only a pro-Leave agenda, but a pro-Farage one; some now openly question Auntie’s future.

Most of these charges focus on particular presenters, interviews or formats the accuser disapproves of. More worrying are those who question the virtue of due impartiality itself, simpering babyishly that broadcasters should instead air ‘The Truth’. Happily enough, The Truth just happens to match their own worldview, perhaps with an occasional nod to benighted opponents and their wrongthink.

Liberals on this side of the Atlantic have become as accustomed as their analogues on the other side to blaming their defeats on nefarious Russian plots. That’s not to say that the Kremlin doesn’t seek to influence elections in the West (it does) or that Putin wouldn’t favour the destabilisation of a rival superstate (he would). But liberals have fashioned a soothing parable in which a few Russian troll farms are all that’s stopping the people of Sunderland from embracing their inner European integrationist.

Those who weren’t brainwashed by Boris the Bot were motivated by ethnic prejudice. A fair whack of Remainers are positive their opponents are knuckle-dragging bigots. This view seems particularly prevalent amongst Labour members, though I suppose when it comes to racism they should know. 

Tell yourself often enough that your opponents are Freddy Krueger and you will come to resent all democratic niceties and wonder if a more direct approach might be in order. Accosting politicians (the good ones) and shouting at them is A Threat to the Fabric of Our Democracy; accosting others (the bad ones) and hitting them with a milkshake is not. As a result, nominally-liberal commentators are dunking their own reputations to excuse what the police treat as common assault.

The phrase "clinically fascinating" could have been more or less invented for these people.

In reality, of course, there is no great mystery about the Brexit vote. The simple truth is that the more people learn about the European Union the less they like it, and so the same generation that had voted for membership of the Common Market in 1973 ended up voting in 2016 to leave the EU. The European Union had been growing progressively more unpopular in Britain for the better part of thirty years, and then when dear old David Cameron declined to make any sort of intellectual case for EU membership and simply decided to force the issue he underestimated both the degree of Euro-scepticism in the country and his own personal unpopularity with conservative voters. Thus on the one hand he was undone by a near total lack of hard polling data on the subject of "Europe" that weren't forty years out of date. On the other, he was utterly overwhelmed by the cumulative result of two generations' worth of "cultural change"

Said cultural problem is of course the easiest to write about and (to me at least) the most obvious, and yet it's the one that the cognitively dissonant liberals have been most keen to ignore. The "European project" had been lashed (or lashed itself) to the mast of every neo-Marxist fad of the last 50 years, from green energy to gay marriage to NATO expansion to (conversely) anti-Bush-anti-war-anti-Americanism: the same people who legalised buggery for children and banned foxhunting had wanted us to join the Euro; people whose fathers (or grandfathers) had organised the trains to Auschwitz had preached at us about how Europe was more "civilised" than the backward and barbarous United States because America still had the death penalty. And more often than not the whole package had been topped off with an implicit sneer at all things English, from the weather (because having the most temperate climate in the world is boring and depressing, presumably) to our food and drink (because wine and pizza are healthier than ale and roast beef, supposedly - and everyone eats curry now anyway, you racist!) to the clothes we wore (because by the late 1990s even James Bond was wearing Italian designer labels) to the language we used on telly (mostly Americanised, as it happens, but only ridiculous "Little Englanders" ever complained) to (of course!) our history (because the British Empire, far from being the greatest and most enlightened the world had ever seen, just happened to be the biggest and most malignant - and because the Monarchy obviously had to be modernised, if not abolished altogether).

But that hasn't stopped the mad doyens of the "liberal" Left from finding any number of alternative, more imaginative solutions to the Brexit conundrum. An eye-wateringly terrible book by Danny Dorling (a professor of geography - yes, really!) and Sally Tomlinson (who is an emeritus professor of education - WTF?) called Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire manages to blame virtually the whole Brexit vote on yes, you guessed it, nasty reactionary British imperialists who can't cope with the loss of the Empire. (It may not be the worst book about Brexit, but it certainly has a good claim to be one of them.)

As you can imagine, given that Dorling and Tomlinson blame the result of the 2016 referendum on something that ceased to exist long before Britain voted in favour of joining the Common Market in the 1973 referendum, it's somewhat light on relevant facts and logical arguments. To take just one example, there is (happily) absolutely no evidence that '71 percent of under 25s' voted to remain in the EU. The truth is that it was more like 46%, considerably less than the proportion of their parents' generation who would have voted to stay in the previous referendum and significantly less than the proportion of remainers amongst older voters in 2016. And in so far as the book has an argument, we're meant to believe that Brexit was caused by the rich getting richer thanks to austerity (because austerity makes people richer, presumably), which meant that they could make the poor work so hard that they were too weak to protest against the rich who were also stealing from them. (Or is "austerity" a form of theft? I'm not sure.)

In fact according to Dorling and Tomlinson the Brexit vote was all because we allowed 'a handful of billionaires [imperial nostalgics all, apparently] to poison [our] national conversation with disinformation'.* But how did those billionaires manage that, one wonders, when most tabloids came out for Remain in the referendum and the overwhelming majority of the population don't read newspapers anyway? We may never know. (By 2016 the proportion who did still read the 'papers was down to 29% and the number who actually took a regular paper was down to just 6 million, or about 10%.)

So what can you do? Mysteries that aren't even mysteries require new and more ingenious conspiracies to explain them. '[H]ow can a Britain of 2019 see a rise in death-rates, child poverty & infant mortality', ponders this review. Well, gee, maybe it's got something to do with our ageing population and women having babies much too late - which, it may shock you to hear, may, just may have something to do with house prices, which may, just may have something to do with supply and demand, which may, just may have something to do with immigration. But then that might suggest that immigration isn't just a non-issue cooked up by racialists and imperial nostalgia junkies to hoodwink the horrible hateful white working class.

In reality, of course, the biggest British imperialists of the middle of the twentieth century, whether they came from the liberal Right (such as Churchill) or from the "moderate" Left (such as Sir Oswald Mosley) were very much in favour of the European project. It was cranks and gadflies like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell (both committed anti-Americans) who came out swinging against European integration.

But then that of course is the whole point of cognitive dissonance. Who needs facts when your liberal beliefs are obviously so much preferable?

UPDATE: If you have to ask the question...

*This is according to someone with the name Joris Luyendijk. (Make of that what you will.)