Читать книгу Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of - Mick Hume, Mick Hume - Страница 8

This is not a book about Brexit. Nor is it a book about the election of Donald Trump. It is about a much bigger issue – one the debate around those extraordinary events has highlighted. What’s at stake is the future of democracy itself, in the UK, the US and across the West.

We live at a strange moment in the history of democratic politics. Today, perhaps for the first time, every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle. Yet in practice the authorities are seeking to limit democratic decision-making and separate power from the people.

They invest authority instead in unelected institutions, from the courts to the European Commission. Elected politicians act as a professional elite, divorced from those they are supposed to represent. And everywhere, the intellectual fashion is to question whether voters are really fit or qualified to make democratic decisions on major issues, such as membership of the European Union or the Presidency of the United States.

Ours is the age of ‘I’m a democrat, but …’, when the establishment insists it is all for democracy, but only in moderation; it just cannot tolerate what one former member of President Barack Obama’s administration calls ‘too much of a good thing’, suggesting that America ‘might be a healthier democracy if it were a slightly less democratic one’.1 For some in high places these days it seems that, where democracy is concerned, less really can be more.

It is an attitude captured in the UK by former Conservative prime minister John Major who, dismissing the suggestion that the Brexit referendum result should be binding, declared that ‘the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy’.2 Some of us might naively have imagined that majority rule was the essence of democracy. But not, it seems, when millions of common ‘tyrants’ vote against the wishes of the minority political elite.

It is time we started not only to defend popular democracy, but to argue for far more of it, with no ifs, buts or by-your-leaves.

So this is not just a book about Brexit, or about Trump. The best place to begin the argument, however, is with the fallout from that UK referendum and the US election, which has brought the bigger picture sharply into focus. Whichever side you were on in those votes, the wider issue of your right to decide is now on the line.

In Animal Farm, his 1945 allegorical novel about the Soviet Union’s descent from popular revolution to Stalinist tyranny, George Orwell gives one of the great definitions of the betrayal of democracy. It becomes clear that the farm has turned into a totalitarian system when the powerful elite of pigs alters the founding principle of Animal Farm painted on the barn wall. To the noble declaration ‘All Animals Are Equal’ they add the qualification ‘… But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others’.3

Of course that’s only dystopian fiction from 1945, in the faraway era of world war and totalitarianism. Even Orwell originally entitled it Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. It couldn’t happen here.

Fast-forward to September 2016 and the director of the pollsters BritainThinks goes on BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning Today programme, to discuss the findings of their focus-group conversations with voters from both sides of the June referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

Deborah Mattinson reported that some of the victorious Leave voters ‘think the Remainers are rich people’ who had benefited from the status quo within the EU. Something of a generalisation no doubt, but fair enough, perhaps. That argument at least acknowledges that those Remain voters had made a reasonable decision that might be seen as in their own self-interests. Think-tank research did find that, in the words of one Tory newspaper, ‘Britain’s ruling classes were the only group to vote overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union’.4

And what about the other side of the divide? What did the losing Remain voters in Mattinson’s focus groups think of the opposite lot? Well, she said bluntly, ‘Some of the Remainers think that some of the Leavers were stupid and shouldn’t have the vote.’ This revelation almost had Today’s world-weary host John Humphrys choking on his croissant.5

So it became possible, not in the allegorical dystopias of 1940s fairy tales but in the real world of twenty-first-century British politics, to hear it seriously proposed by some that some members of the electorate, though formally qualified to participate in our democracy, are ‘stupid and shouldn’t have the vote’. Or as Orwell’s oligarchical pigs might have put it, ‘All Voters Are Equal, But Some Voters Are More Equal Than Others.’

That report was no one-off. The ‘too thick to vote’ point might have been particularly blunt, but the underlying sentiment was the stuff of countless tweets, posts, articles, outbursts and reports in response to the referendum. The essential message was that all those Leave voters don’t know what’s good for them. The implication was that they should not have been allowed the right to make the wrong choice on such an issue.

That sneering attitude was even reflected in the satirical magazine Private Eye; under the spoof headline ‘Turkeys Vote for Christmas in Referendum Cliffhanger’, it reported that some turkeys were already regretting their ‘Brexmas vote’ as ‘evidence is piling up that, come Christmas lunch, they will in fact have their heads cut off, their giblets put in a plastic bag and be well and truly stuffed’. If it was irony the Eye was after, how about ‘Satirists Side with Establishment’?6

Then came the second political earthquake of 2016 – the November election of Republican candidate and celebrity capitalist Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The bitter responses to the voters’ failure to elect Democratic Party favourite Hillary Clinton were if anything even more starkly anti-democratic than the anti-Brexit backlash.

‘Your Vote is a Hate Crime!’ declared anti-Trump protesters, graffiti artists and bloggers, implying that Trump supporters should be denied not only their vote, but their liberty.7

One leading Democrat commentator issued the blanket declaration that ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter’. Meanwhile a celebrity professor of political science drew the no doubt scientific conclusion that Trump’s victory was ‘the dance of the dunces’, made possible by wasting the right to vote on ‘uneducated, low-information white people’.8 Some voters, it appears, are now deemed ‘more equal than others’ because they are considered better-informed, or just better people.

As with the barn in Animal Farm, here too it appears that the writing is on the wall. The Brexit vote and the Trump election have shone the spotlight on democracy. Many in the upper reaches of politics, the media and culture do not like what they see.

They fear that they are witnessing a revolt of those whom candidate Clinton branded ‘the deplorables’ during the US election campaign. And they find the idea of such deplorable people exercising democratic power frankly revolting.

Reservations about allowing the people to vote and have some power over their lives have been around ever since the ancient Greeks invented the concept of democracy. As we explore in chapter 3, even in the modern era democracy was long considered a dirty word in the upper echelons of Western societies. It is only in more recent times that these prejudices have been restrained beneath the surface of polite society, as everybody has felt obliged to pay lip service to the principle of democracy.

But the fury of the political, economic and cultural elites in response to the 17.4 million UK voters who dared to back Brexit, and the 62 million-plus Americans who had the temerity to vote for Trump, brought these anti-democratic poisons bubbling to the surface of our civilised societies once more.

The real Brexit–Trump connection

There has been a concerted attempt to explain the link between the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump. For angry social media commentators, it seemed obvious that ‘both were clearly mired in racism, bigotry and hate’. Many mainstream media pundits took a similar line, concluding that ‘both votes were marked by emotional, divisive campaigns’ and were won on ‘a tide’ of racism and hate.9

Much of this misses the point. The important link between the Brexit and Trump votes was not the campaigns, but the reaction they provoked. Both results were met by an extraordinary outburst of fear and loathing from political and cultural elites, revealing their barely concealed contempt for the people and democracy. If there has been a dangerous hatred on view, it is the hatred of the ‘herd’ on both sides of the Atlantic.

To be clear from the start: while I supported the Brexit vote, I have no truck with Trump. The parallels are only in the way those backing the two campaigns have been condemned from on high.

Both results reflected the intensity of feeling against the respective political establishments. But the outcome was different. Whereas the vote to Leave the EU represented a positive blow for more democracy, the turnout for Trump was a negative reaction to the same problem of a political elite lacking legitimacy. There is a difference between supporting a broad democratic principle in a yes/no referendum, and backing a specific party’s narrow-minded candidate in an election.

That is why some of us in the UK who voted Leave with passion could not have contemplated voting for the illiberal, free-speech-stomping Donald. Nor, by the way, could we have stomached supporting the illiberal-liberal Hillary Clinton. (Note to the confused: the Brexit referendum result was not a vote for Trump fan and UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who responded to his triumph by giving up politics rather than taking power.)

No; the genuine comparison between the two concerns not the actors, but the anti-democratic reaction to the results. The backlash against Brexit set the pattern.

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate went to the polls to vote in a referendum on whether the nation should Remain a member of the European Union, or Leave the EU. They voted to Leave, by 51.8 per cent to 48.2. The 17.4 million who voted Leave constituted the largest number of people who have ever voted for anything in British political history; the 16.1 million who backed Remain made up the second-largest vote for anything, reflecting the importance of the issue. (The most votes ever acquired by any party in a UK general election were the 14.1 million won by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1992 – representing 41.9 per cent of the votes cast. Oddly, Major did not seem to object to the tyranny of the minority on that occasion.)

The result was a remarkable popular rejection of the institutions of the EU – which, as chapter 4 argues, have been one of the major barriers to the practice of democratic politics in Europe. It represented a demand for more democracy and national sovereignty, and less diktat from the Euro-bureaucracy. It was also a sharp slap in the face for the British political class, who have long used the EU to sidestep democratic debate at home.

The UK’s political, economic and cultural elites, who had all assumed until the last minute – along with every pollster, pundit and bookmaker – that Remain would win easily, reacted to the referendum result as if an earthquake had caused the solid ground to disappear from beneath their feet. How could this have happened?

After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn those British voters that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a political descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices.

They had been told to vote Remain by the leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, from Tory prime minister David Cameron to left-wing Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. They had been instructed that there was no realistic alternative to voting Remain by the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the President of the United States, a cross-section of leading lights from the arts and every imaginable celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten. For its part, the official Leave campaign had looked like an embarrassing shambles. Yet still a majority of voters had refused to do as they were told they must, and opted to Leave the EU.

In the eyes of the establishment it appeared that the only possible explanation for this outrageous outcome was that those millions of voters were simply too ignorant, too uneducated, too gullible, bigoted or emotional to understand what they were being told. Leave voters were depicted as being like that naughty child whose finger is drawn inexorably towards the big, red button by all the warning signs telling him ‘Danger – Do Not Press’.

Most striking was how quickly the discussion ceased to be about the specific issues of Brexit, and became about much bigger questions of democratic decision-making. The emphasis shifted away from what the electorate thought of the EU, towards what the pro-EU elites thought of the revolting electorate. Answer: not much. It may take a long time for the wrangling over the details of UK–EU relations to become clear. But the wider threat to democracy in the anti-Brexit backlash was evident from the start.

To clarify: this book’s attack on the antics of the pro-EU elites is not aimed at the 16.1 million who voted to Remain. That would be a remarkably large ‘elite’ by anybody’s standards. Most of those Remainers were normal voters who made a rational choice, just as the Leavers did. Millions of them are also respecters of democracy. In a YouGov survey published in November 2016, 68 per cent of all respondents said that the UK should follow the referendum result and go ahead with Brexit. Those who had voted to Remain in June were now ‘evenly divided’ between those who ‘think the government has a duty to implement the decision and leave’ and those who ‘would like to see the government ignore or overturn the referendum result’.10

The political, economic and cultural elites leading the anti-democratic campaign to ‘ignore or overturn the referendum result’ were a small minority within that minority, symbolised by such big-name, big-headed Remainers as Tony Blair or Sir Richard Branson. The 2016 poster girl for their crusade was Gina Miller, the multi-millionaire investment fund manager who led the legal challenge to the government over Brexit, because she said the revolting voters’ verdict made her feel ‘physically sick’. After the high court found in her favour, Ms Miller the City financier declared that the abuse she had received ‘means I am doing something right for investors’.11 This clique constitutes an elite in the worst sense of the word, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a class of people ‘having the most power and influence in a society’, not due to any superior talents but ‘especially on account of their wealth or privilege’.

Weeks after the vote, European President Jean-Claude Juncker gave the official EU version of events in an interview with a French youth YouTube channel (where else would you make an important announcement these days?). Monsieur Juncker claimed that the blame lay with British politicians who had spent more than forty years spreading ‘so many lies, so many half-truths’ about the EU, telling ‘your general public that European Union is stupid, that there is nothing worth …’12 His underlying message was that the ‘general public’ in the UK must have been sufficiently ‘stupid’ to believe whatever lies the politicians fed them.

Yet if anything looked ignorant or misinformed in this discussion, it was Juncker’s claim that influential British politicians have been indoctrinating the general public with anti-EU ‘lies and half-truths’ for more than forty years.

Almost until the referendum campaign began, the political outlook labelled ‘Euro-scepticism’ had been a fringe affair, considered in parliament to be the preserve of only a few Tory head-bangers. Since the UK joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, no government had advocated leaving. The last time any major UK political party pledged to leave the EU at a general election was back in 1983, when it formed part of the Labour Party’s left-wing manifesto – described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – which resulted in a devastating defeat.

In the June 2016 referendum campaign, the leaders of every mainstream party – including Labour’s Corbyn, supposedly a long-standing left-wing Eurosceptic – backed the conformist Remain campaign. Even leading Tory Leave campaigner Boris Johnson had no history of being anti-EU, and had gone so far as to write an (unpublished) pro-Remain column months before the referendum.

The popular Brexit vote looked far more like a spirited revolt against discredited and two-faced politicians than any tame acquiescence to their instructions. In response, those politicians reacted as if they had been shot at. After the referendum Cameron quit as prime minister with a speed normally reserved for political leaders who are assassinated in office.

Bewildered leading Members of Parliament from all sides joined hands to bemoan the ‘national disaster’ of the Brexit vote. The immediate reaction was well captured by Labour MP and former government minister David Lammy, who tweeted a desperate appeal to his fellow members of the political class: ‘Wake up. We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness and bring this nightmare to an end through a vote in Parliament … there should be a vote in Parliament next week.’13 For the Right Honourable Lammy it seemed a display of popular democracy was madness, people voting other than as instructed a nightmare. All honourable parliamentarians needed to wake up and overturn the historic referendum result within the week.

Another senior Labour MP, Keith Vaz, bewailed the ‘crushing, crushing decision … a terrible day for Britain … catastrophic. In a thousand years I would never have believed the British people would have voted in this way’. So how could a majority of those who voted – including his own constituents in Leicester – have done so in such an unbelievable, catastrophic fashion, and inflicted what Vaz seems to think was Britain’s most terrible day since circa 1066? They voted, concluded Vaz, ‘emotionally rather than looking at the facts’.14 It couldn’t possibly be that voters had looked at ‘the facts’ and reasonably drawn the opposite conclusion from their MPs; it had to be that the naughty children had let their feelings run away with them.

Politicians and lobbyists who claim to be most in favour of change in the UK seemed among those most upset by the popular vote to change Britain’s relationship with the EU. Progressives and the Left have historically been the people who fought to ‘leave’ the current state of the world. Yet now they appeared determined to ‘remain’ in the status quo of the conformist EU.

The establishment’s call for a Remain vote had been backed by leading liberal and left-wing voices from the Guardian to the New Statesman, the Labour Party mainstream to the ‘Corbynite’ Momentum campaign. Some reacted with bitterness and bile when the popular vote went against them. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, grand dame of British liberalism, denounced the ‘stupidity’ of the Leave campaign and demanded that 231 Labour MPs – 70 per cent of whose constituencies returned majorities for Leave – must be ‘brave’ and vote to ‘save us’ from the votes of 17.4 million Leavers – in the name of ‘representative democracy’, of couse.15

Nationalist politicians whose declared aim is to enable their people to break free from the United Kingdom appeared particularly furious at any suggestion that the British people should want to break free from the European Union.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party declared a state of national ‘fury’ over the Brexit vote (the majority of voters in Scotland supported Remain) and threatened to veto Brexit, in the apparent belief that democracy means 1.66 million Scottish Remain votes are so much more equal than others that they can outweigh 17.4 million Leave votes from across the UK.16

In the province of Northern Ireland, where a majority backed Remain, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness denounced the ‘toxic’ UK vote and declared that: ‘The island of Ireland is facing the biggest constitutional crisis since partition [in 1921] as a result of the Brexit referendum.’17 This might have come as a surprise to those who recall the ‘constitutional crisis’ posed by the twenty-five-year armed conflict over sovereignty that raged in Northern Ireland from 1969, which first brought Mr McGuinness to public attention. For this leading Irish republican, however, it appears that a popular vote for Britain to leave the EU is now far more ‘toxic’ than the arrival of British troops to keep Northern Ireland within the UK.

Elsewhere the Leave vote was dismissed by leading UK liberal writers as a ‘howl of rage’,18 as if those voters had been little more than dumb animals responding like pups to the ‘dog-whistle politics’ of xenophobic demagogues; a modern reincarnation of the howling, foul-breathed ‘beast with many heads’, as Shakespeare’s arrogant Roman general Coriolanus brands the people of Rome.

The consensus appeared to be that Leave voters must have taken leave of their senses to go against the advice of their betters. These responses let slip the mask and revealed the old elitist prejudices about the people not being fit for our democracy (rather than the other way around).

Like every leading anti-democrat since Plato, who wanted to replace the roughhouse of Athenian democracy with the rule of philosophers and experts, the political elites of the UK and Europe believe that matters of government are far too complex and sophisticated to let the governed decide. ‘We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it,’ as EC President Juncker once said, in his previous life as prime minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (before becoming Duke of the Grand Duchy of Brussels).19 Better by far, then, not to bother the masses’ little heads with such democratic nonsense as elections and referendums wherever possible.

After the shock of the Brexit result, one might have expected the transatlantic elites to be ready for an upset in the coming US presidential election. Yet such was their smug complacency that they remained convinced the American people would take their instructions, reject the wild-talking maverick Donald Trump, and elect the respectable machine politician Hillary Clinton.

Less than a fortnight before polling day, a leading UK liberal commentator was berating the ‘political and media class’ for continuing to cover Trump’s failing campaign rather than focusing on the real issue – the coming Clinton presidency: ‘The big question in American politics is not whether Hillary Clinton will be president. It is what kind of president she is likely to be.’20 On the eve of the election, the pollsters and bookmakers all seemed to agree that Clinton was a certainty for the White House.

When, on 8 November, the American electorate dared to disagree with these premature verdicts, and instead handed Trump the keys to the White House via the electoral college, there appeared to be even greater astonishment than after the Brexit referendum. How could this have happened?

After all, Trump had not only been denounced as a disgrace to US politics by the Democratic Party establishment, but also effectively disowned by all but a handful of senior figures from his own Republican side. The media too had been overwhelmingly anti-Trump, with only two established regional newspapers backing him in the entire United States.

And the worlds of Hollywood and celebrity, considered so influential in public life today, had been solidly for Hillary over Donald, staging a series of last-minute concert-rallies featuring the likes of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and Madonna, with a bit of Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen thrown in for the wrinklier voters. How could Americans resist being dazzled by such a star-studded appeal?

When more than 62 million Americans did just that and voted for Trump, the reaction was a mixture of consternation and condemnation. Leading liberal voice Arianna Huffington declared the election of Trump to be simply ‘incomprehensible’. After all, the blogging mega-site she founded, the Huffington Post (still bearing her name though under different direction), had attached this editorial reminder to every report about the Trump campaign: ‘Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the U.S.’ Couldn’t these 62 million people read?21

David Remnick, editor of Big Apple institution the New Yorker, immediately pronounced Trump’s election to be not just incomprehensible but ‘an American Tragedy … a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism … [A] sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy.’22 He might have been describing the 9/11 terror attacks on America rather than a disappointing election result. Liberal film-maker Jim Jarmusch expanded further on that theme, explaining that ‘the election of Trump is not only a tragedy for the United States. It is a tragedy for the world’.23

Meanwhile on American college campuses, students held a ‘cry-in’ (Cornell) or staged a collective ‘primal scream’ (Yale) to demonstrate their trauma and pain at the ‘sickening’ election of Trump. In turn, college authorities cancelled exams and offered their students counselling and time off to ‘grieve’, as if they were all the victims of an unexpected natural disaster, or perhaps an unheralded alien invasion.24

These reactions to both Brexit and Trump appeared different from the normal responses to an electoral setback. It was not simply that the losing side did not agree with the voters’ verdict; it did not understand how they could possibly have reached it. The defeated establishment figures found the results not just uncomfortable, but entirely incomprehensible.

In short these seemed like more than ordinary electoral defeats. They signalled deep divisions and, above all, a cultural revolt – the near-total rejection of the values of the ruling elites by a sizeable section of the electorate. The subsequent response has been not to doubt the efficacy of those top-down values, but to question the wisdom of allowing the revolting masses to pass judgement on them from below.

Two nations

The divides laid bare by the EU referendum in the UK and Trump’s election in the US brought to mind the leading Victorian Benjamin Disraeli, later to become a Tory prime minister, who described in his novel Sybil, Or the Two Nations (1845) a state of ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.’25 The divide today, however, is not quite such a black-and-white – or ‘binary’ – split caused simply by differences in wealth.

In the UK the divisions revealed by the EU referendum have been endlessly analysed along demographic lines, to show that young people were more likely to vote Remain than older people, or that higher votes for Remain were often found in areas with higher numbers of graduates from higher education and vice versa, or that most poorer people voted to Leave.

There is something in these attempts to analyse the divide. Class divisions certainly played an important part. But the focus on demographic divisions tends to make them appear permanent and immovable. The most important divides revealed by the results in the UK and the US, however, were surely the political and cultural splits across society today. This points up the importance of democratic debate – a clash between differing sets of values – to decide which direction our societies want to take.

Such meaningful debates have been scarce in recent times. Instead politics and public life in the UK, the US and other Western societies have increasingly become the preserve of a professional elite of officials, opinion formers and experts. This professionalised political elite relates to the rest of society through the media, if at all. Meanwhile millions of those patronised as ‘ordinary people’ have been treated as Others, deemed outside of politics and beyond the pale, their concerns marginalised and ignored.

If there is a gap between those who did and did not go to university in the UK, for example, it is not simply that Remainers are smart and Leavers ‘too thick to vote’. It is more that those who participate in higher education – now around 40 per cent of young people in the UK – tend to be imbued with very different values, which reject most traditional ideas still dear to many in the world outside the university campus.

The new class of intellectual and moral elitists has been well described by the US writer Joel Kotkin as a ‘Clerisy’, a term he borrows from the English philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some 180 years ago, notes Kotkin, Coleridge described approvingly an educated, enlightened middle class that would serve a priestly function for society. He called them a Clerisy, adapted from Klerisei, a German word for clergy. One dictionary suggests that ‘Coleridge may have equated clerisy with an old sense of clergy meaning “learning” or “knowledge”’, which by his time was used in the proverb ‘an ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy’.26 The poet wanted to reassert the authority of the enlightened elite he called the Clerisy over the base ‘mother wit’ of the masses.

Now, says Kotkin, what we have in both the US and Europe is a New Clerisy of middle-class professionals who dominate politics, culture, education and the media, ‘serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth’.27 Kotkin observed in the run-up to the 2012 US presidential election that: ‘Many of [the Clerisy’s] leading lights appear openly hostile to democracy … They believe that power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats, but with credentialed “experts” whether operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.’ That hostility to democracy has only intensified over the past few years.

The Brexit vote marked a breakthrough revolt of ‘the common man’ and woman against the ‘enforced conformity’ preached by the New Clerisy. That it came as such a shock to the Clerisy was a sign of how little contact they had with the real world occupied by Other People.

They might have done well to note the report by David Cowling, former head of the BBC’s political research unit, which was leaked just before the referendum. He noted that: ‘There are many millions of people in the UK who do not enthuse about diversity and do not embrace metropolitan values yet do not consider themselves lesser human beings for all that. Until their values and opinions are acknowledged and respected, rather than ignored and despised, our present discord will persist.’

Cowling observed that ‘these discontents run very wide and very deep and the metropolitan political class, confronted by them, seems completely bewildered and at a loss about how to respond (“who are these ghastly people and where do they come from?” doesn’t really hack it).’

His report concluded that the EU referendum had ‘witnessed the cashing in of some very bitter bankable grudges’ but that throughout the campaign ‘Europe has been the shadow not the substance.’ The ‘ghastly people’ had simply seized upon the EU referendum and voted Leave as a way to express their long-held wide and deep discontent with the elite who so obviously despised them.28

A few months later, the November 2016 US presidential election marked another remarkable revolt against the New Clerisy’s values of ‘enforced conformism’. As with Brexit, the elitist view of Trump’s victory as ‘incomprehensible’ only demonstrated how detached the US establishment had become from the lives and concerns of millions of Americans.

After the election, everybody suddenly started asking ‘How could They vote for HIM?’ It should not have been too difficult to get sensible answers beforehand. It was just that nobody had bothered to ask ‘them’. Belatedly, some major media outlets did attempt the basic journalistic job of talking to voters. When the Washington Post asked its readers to give a brief post-election explanation of ‘Why I Voted for Trump’, it had soon received more than 1600 revealing responses.

Many of them were at pains to emphasise that, in the words of one voter, ‘I do not 100 per cent love Donald Trump’, and to disassociate themselves from his comments about women and wild outbursts about immigrants. They had voted not so much for Trump as against the establishment that ignored them and backed Clinton; his reported misogynistic remarks had not swayed them, for example, because they never thought or cared about him being a feminist anyway.

As forty-seven-year-old Nicole Citro of Burlington, Virginia, wrote in her contribution to the Post, she ‘saw how the media, the establishment and celebrities tried to derail him’ and hoped ‘that I would be able to witness their collective heads explode when he was successful. Tuesday night [election day] was beyond satisfying to watch unfold.’

Elsewhere in the Post, sixty-one-year-old Diane Maus of Suffern, New York, expressed her anger at how the media discussion had given the impression that ‘voting was a mere formality. The commentary was all about how Hillary Clinton was set to get down to business once the pesky election was over.’ For Diane and millions of Trump voters like her, ‘My vote was my only way to say: I am here and I count.’29

However, ‘the media, the establishment and celebrities’ still were not listening, or at least could not comprehend what was being said. The isolation of these types from the people they look down upon was well summed up by those last-gasp celebrity rallies for Clinton. They seemed seriously to believe that the image of Madonna singing a bad acoustic version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, interspersed with screeching ‘No way, motherf*cker!’ in Trump’s direction, would make a difference on voting day. Imagine that …30 Some appalled American celebrities swore to emigrate after Trump’s election. But they already appeared to be living on a different planet from the people who had voted Trump in order to make the point that ‘I am here and I count’ in a democracy, just as much as Madonna or Beyoncé.

The votes for Brexit and Trump represented a revolt of the Others, a demonstration by the deplorables, against the Clerisy. At a loss to understand what those Others were talking about, the elites instead sought to impose their low opinion of voters as a judgement on the adverse voting results. Why had Remain lost the referendum and Clinton failed to become president? Clearly they could not accept that it was the fault of their unpopular politics, or that they had simply lost the argument. So the populace must be to blame, for losing its senses.

The problem became the revolting people, the demos. In which case the democratic system that gave them the chance to dictate to their betters must ultimately be at fault.

There have been differences in the masses-bashing responses to Brexit and Trump. But three common themes stand out. All are attempts to delegitimise the results and the voters who produced them.

The first theme is that the votes were a result of ignorance and disinformation in the age of ‘post-truth politics’. The second is that the voters must have been motivated by bigotry, racism and hatred. And the third is that, given the above, allowing the votes of the demos to determine important issues is a threat to … democracy.

Let’s look at these excuses in turn.

‘Post-truth’ politics for ‘unqualified simpletons’

It has been widely argued and accepted that those voting for Brexit in the UK or Trump in the US must have been uninformed, ‘low-information’ people, emotionally gullible and easy prey to the lies of demagogues – now renamed ‘post-truth politics’. As leading Labour politician Chuka Umunna summed it up, ‘Both Donald Trump and the Vote Leave camp epitomised “post-truth politics”’.31 This notion updates the prejudice expressed by ancient Greek philosophers that democracy entrusts too much influence to the ignorant, over-emotional and easily misled many at the expense of the wise and enlightened few.

Showing contempt for the masses is no longer the preserve of Roman generals and authoritarian governments. One striking feature of the resurgence of anti-democratic prejudices has been the leading role of liberal intellectuals. The more high-minded the commentator, it appears, the lower view they take of the masses and their apparently mindless antics in the voting booth. As elsewhere, the reaction to the UK referendum result set the pattern.

British intellectuals were in the vanguard of the anti-Brexit backlash. There was Professor Richard Dawkins, the leading evolutionary biologist, professional atheist, humanist scientist and scourge of blind-faith religionists everywhere. In the left-wing New Statesman magazine soon after the referendum, Dawkins the great humanist seemed unable to suppress his true feelings about that large slice of humanity who voted Leave as ‘stupid, ignorant people’. He protested that ‘it is unfair to thrust on to unqualified simpletons the responsibility to take historic decisions of great complexity and sophistication’. Presumably such decisions would be better left to complex and sophisticated minds such as the Professor’s own.32 The great atheist appears to think that the rest of the electorate should have blind faith in the wisdom of the expert priesthood.

Dawkins also protested (retrospectively of course) that ‘the bar should be set higher than 50%’ in referendums, as a way of diminishing the scope for democratic decision-making by unqualified simpletons: ‘A two-thirds majority, or at least a threshold that lies outside the statistical margin of error, is one way to guard against this.’ In other words, a minority should have a veto. It was left to psychology professor David Shanks to point out in a letter to the Statesman that Dawkins himself was ‘guilty of a statistical error’; margins of error have to do with samples in opinion polls, not actual votes: ‘The concept of a margin of error has no meaning when an entire population expresses its opinion.’33 Dawkins’s ‘statistical error’ looked like a classic example of an eminent scientist using scientific-sounding language to justify his personal opinion about a political issue on which he has no more claim to expertise than any other voter.

Nobody seemed more agitated about the Brexit vote than the normally unflappable ‘leading man of the Left’, philosophy Professor A. C. Grayling, who wrote to every Member of Parliament (apparently in the name of his students), demanding that they take a vote to ignore the result and remain in the European Union. In his 2009 book, Liberty in the Age of Terror, Professor Grayling had warned of the need to defend our hard-won democracy, rights and ‘Enlightenment values’ against the encroachments of the security state.34 Now, by contrast, he called upon the authorities to usurp the referendum result and secure Britain’s membership of the EU against the encroachments of the unenlightened people.

Writing in the New European, house journal of the Remainers, where he was heralded as ‘Britain’s leading philosopher’ (surely that should be ‘Europe’s’?), Professor Grayling laid into the ‘uninformed, hasty, emotional and populist ways’ Leave had won, based on mere ‘demagoguery and sentiment’. The good Professor’s repeated attacks on the ‘emotional’ attitudes of the other side might seem ironic, since nobody wrote more emotionally about it than him. Presumably the majority of those who voted had simply expressed the incorrect emotions.35

The real problem, according to Professor Grayling, is that ‘the majority of people are “System One” or “quick” thinkers’ who ‘make decisions on impulse, feeling, emotion, and first impressions’. This left them open to ‘manipulation’ by demagogues peddling ‘post-truth politics’ and ‘downright lies’, who had persuaded them to support the ‘lunatic’ notion of Brexit. What we need, apparently, is to pay more heed to ‘System Two’ or ‘slow’ thinkers, ‘who seek information, analyse it, and weigh arguments in order to come to decisions’ – such as voting Remain, of course. It seems that ‘System Two’ voters are naturally more equal than others.36

Would the professor prefer to see the re-introduction of special university seats in the UK parliament, which gave graduates of Oxbridge and other top universities an extra vote until they were abolished by the ghastly Labour government after the Second World War?

The emphasis of many critics was on the ‘Brexit lies’ of the Leave campaign and how they had led gullible voters astray. This was apparently proof that we live in the age of ‘post-truth politics’. Indeed not long after the referendum and the election of Trump, Oxford Dictionaries announced that ‘post-truth’ was its international word of the year for 2016. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this award-winning expression to mean ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. The Remainers reduced this to the basic claim that their ‘objective facts’ and truths had lost out to Leave’s ‘appeals to emotion’ and outright Brexit lies.

In the aftermath of the June vote there was much dark talk about the need for the enlightened to tackle ‘post-truth’ politics. The UK Electoral Reform Society produced a damning report on the referendum campaign, claiming that there had been ‘glaring deficiencies’ in the facts offered by both sides which had left voters ‘feeling totally ill-informed’. The ERS report concluded with the Orwellian-sounding proposal for an ‘official body … empowered to intervene when overtly misleading information is disseminated’ in future political campaigns, presumably to protect gullible voters from their own ignorance by force-feeding them official facts. Perhaps it should be called the Ministry of Truth?37

What’s the truth about those ‘Brexit lies’? There were of course exaggerated claims and flights of fancy on both sides of the EU referendum: from the official Leave campaign’s fantasy of a quick extra £350 million a week for the NHS, to the Remain campaign’s horror stories of imminent economic depression; from Boris Johnson’s comparison of the EU with Hitler, to David Cameron’s warning that a vote for Brexit would delight ISIS and could start the Third World War.

Much of this is the overblown-but-normal cut-and-thrust of heated political debate in an electoral firefight. Voters do not need to be protected from such stuff by the wise men and women of the European Commission, the ERS or any other fact-checkers or ‘official body’ set up to decide The Truth on our behalf. What voters need is to be left alone to listen to all the arguments, join in the debate as they see fit, and ultimately decide for themselves what they consider to be truly in their own, and their society’s, best interests. In this sense, the EU referendum looks like an advert for the virtues of popular democracy.

Indeed, far from being duped by Brexit lies, the Electoral Reform Society report on the campaign revealed that most voters they spoke to had a ‘highly negative’ view of the official campaigns, and said the top politicians’ appeals had made ‘no difference’ to how they voted in the end. Where there had been any effect, it was most often the opposite of what the politicians intended; the interventions by top Remain-backing figures, from Cameron and Corbyn to Nicola Sturgeon and Barack Obama, had all made people marginally more likely to vote Leave.

They should have known. A pre-referendum poll conducted by Ipsos MORI was already revealing about the likely impact of experts and political elites. In May 2016 they asked respondents to answer the question: ‘Who do you trust on issues related to the referendum on EU membership?’. The winner with 73 per cent approval was ‘Friends and immediate family’. Other strong runners included ‘Work colleagues’ and notably ‘The ordinary man/woman in the street’, both with 46 per cent approval ratings. Lower down came ‘Leaders of large business’ (36 per cent) and ‘Civil servants’ (29 per cent). Rooted in the relegation zone of this public trust table were ‘Journalists’ on just 16 per cent and lastly ‘Politicians generally’ with a miserable 12 per cent – in a much lower league than those ‘ordinary’ men and women in the street.38

(The one odd note in this expert-bashing survey of public trust was that ‘Academics’ came second behind ‘Friends and immediate family’, with 66 per cent, showing that these experts are still held in relatively high regard. Not high enough, mind you, for the UK’s overwhelmingly pro-Remain academic community to make a difference to the ultimate referendum result.)

What, then, was ‘the truth’ that the Remain campaign had tried and failed to sell to voters? Essentially they sought to displace any discussion of the wider political issues of democracy and sovereignty, and focus the debate on their dire predictions of economic doom if the UK voted to leave the EU, in a bid to bully supposedly simple-minded voters into obedience. The message echoed the fatalistic view that was captured by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and has effectively been repeated by every UK prime minister since; that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the economic status quo, so forget about choice, lie back and think of the European Single Market.

The possible economic consequences of Brexit remain unclear, and were certainly uncertain in advance of the referendum. So what were the fear-mongers’ warnings of economic catastrophe really saying to UK voters? That it does not matter what you think or want, the global financial markets must decide. Share prices and the exchange rate of the pound are the determining factors of history. Your vote is worthless by comparison; swallow your medicine and watch the markets.

Yet for all this, what was remarkable was that the majority of the 72.2 per cent who voted declined to be swayed or bullied into submission. They kept their eyes on the bigger issues of sovereignty and democracy and voted Leave because they wanted more control over their own lives, UK politics and the country’s borders. It was not about the electorate’s ignorance or economic illiteracy. Millions made the entirely rational calculation that these reasons were important enough to support Leave, even if the immediate economic impact was uncertain and might prove adverse. Contrary to what the doom-mongers claim about ‘post-truth’ politics, it is perfectly reasonable to decide that the possibility of a fall in the value of the pound could be a price worth paying for an increase in democracy and sovereignty. Just as it was perfectly rational for others to vote Remain because they judged it to be in their best material interests.

Even before the US presidential election, many American critics were already following the lead of the Remain campaign and complaining about the influence of ‘low-information’ (code for low-intelligence) voters and the emotive ‘post-truth politics’ allegedly being practised by the Trump campaign. A week before polling day, academic Marci A. Hamilton caught the mood of exasperation when she asked in Newsweek, ‘Why are white, uneducated voters willing to vote for Trump?’ Answering her own question, as most academics like to do, she concluded, ‘I would posit that it is also because they have not been adequately educated to understand just how dangerous a President Trump would be to the Constitution.’ In other words, they had not been ‘adequately educated’ by the likes of Hamilton to swallow whatever they were now being told by the same people.39

In the shocked reaction to Trump’s election, these latent prejudices about the influence of ‘low-information’ American voters came pouring forth. Author and radio personality Garrison Keillor snorted that ‘Trump has won. Let the uneducated have their day’.40 For Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, who bluntly blamed Trump’s victory on ‘low-information white people’, the election placed a big question over democracy itself: ‘Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?’41

The arguments about ‘low-information voters’ and ‘post-truth politics’ provided a convenient excuse for the elites’ failure to get enough voters to do their bidding. After all, what hope have you got of convincing people if they are just too stupid and uneducated to recognise what is both true and truly in their interests?

Unfortunately, observed Republican commentator Rob Schwarzwalder, even in its own terms the argument that Trump won because of uneducated voters ‘has the disadvantage of being untrue’. In the 2016 election, the Pew Research Center’s exit polls found, college graduates did favour Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 52 to 43 per cent (though white graduates were for Trump by 49 to 45 per cent), while 52 per cent of voters without a degree voted for Trump with 44 per cent for Clinton. Yet in the previous presidential election in 2012, graduates voted for Democratic president Barack Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 50 to 48 per cent, while those without a college degree favoured Obama by a wider margin, 51 to 47 per cent. It is hard to recall many experts denouncing Obama’s win and blaming it on these ‘uneducated’ voters.

But then this discussion is not really about the statistics of college degrees and votes. It is about the elites recycling age-old prejudices about the dangers of allowing the ignorant, emotional masses to exercise control, in order to excuse their own failings as somehow being a serious flaw in democracy.

This condescending attitude towards the mass of people goes some way to explaining why those voters – who are quite intelligent enough to know when they are being patronised and insulted – refused to do as they were told at the polls. As conservative commentator Fred Weinberg wrote, the media’s basic message to Trump voters was: ‘You’re Uneducated and Deplorable’. Since most media people ‘never talk to real people’, they didn’t get the resentment felt by millions of Americans at ‘being told we live in “flyover country” … comprised of “uneducated” white males who do not understand that we need to be told how to live by “journalists” who live in the progressive bubble. Or by their elected friends.’42

Playing the new race card

The second widespread attempt to explain away the ‘disaster’ of the referendum result and the ‘tragedy’ of the US election has also focused on the shortcomings of the electorate. People who voted for Brexit and for Trump, we are blithely assured, must have been racists, xenophobes and Islamophobics. In which case their votes should be seen as morally illegitimate at least, if not legally suspect.

The pattern was set in the run-up to the EU referendum. Reports that some England football fans involved in trouble during the European Championships in France had been heard chanting ‘F*ck off Europe, we’re all voting Out!’ were seized upon as evidence that Leave supporters were basically an ignorant mob of hooligans, xenophobic and brutish, only a couple of pints away from launching a racist pogrom. The small-minded prejudices displayed like a football flag here were those of leading Remainers towards beer-drinking, football-watching working-class voters, who appear to them far more alien than suave Brussels bureaucrats.

A week before the referendum, pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in the street by an apparently mentally disturbed man with a collection of Nazi books and paraphernalia, shouting about ‘traitors’ and ‘Britain first’. The killer was quickly branded a ‘Brexit nutter’ and pointed to as proof of the hatred and bigotry allegedly endorsed by the Leave campaign. The violent crimes of one racist madman thus became twisted into evidence against millions of sane, non-violent voters.

Almost immediately after the referendum result, a new scare started over a reported spree of ‘hate crimes’ against immigrants in various parts of the UK.

The political elite seized upon the allegations of racism with relish, to try to prove that some bigoted voters really should be seen as less equal than others. ‘I’m afraid it has to be said that there has been a vote from white working class Labour supporters. They have voted in the face of the fact that they have probably never even seen a migrant and it’s the fault of politicians,’ said Tory MP Anna Soubry. Leading Remainer Soubry, who was then minister for small businesses (not small minds?), told the BBC that the Brexit campaign had ‘unleashed’ a latent wave of anti-immigrant racism.43

Labour shadow health secretary (soon to become shadow home secretary) Diane Abbott responded to these attacks on her party’s traditional white working-class voters – by not only agreeing with the critics but going further. Abbott told a ‘Brexit: Unite Against Racism and Hatred’ event at the Labour Party conference that Labour MPs should not even discuss the issue of immigration with Leave supporters. Such people would not be satisfied because ‘what they really want is to see less foreign-looking people on their streets’.44

This cross-party political consensus against the white working classes seemed unsure whether they had voted Leave because they saw too many immigrants on their streets, or in spite of having never seen any. But both Tory and Labour Remainers apparently agreed that the Brexit vote had been a demonstration of British racism and bigotry.

Does anybody seriously believe that 17.4 million UK voters backed Leave for racist motives? If not, how many million racists do they think there really were among Brexit voters? The only thing running wild here was not a racist mob but the dark imaginations of political elitists.

The belief that voting to Remain was an anti-racist decision while Leavers must have been anti-immigrant reveals more about the one-eyed view of the anti-Brexit lobby. What do they imagine is so staunchly pro-migrant about the EU? If the European Union is such an open-borders institution as its officials insist, why are so many migrants barred from entering it drowning in the Mediterranean Sea?

Immigration was an important factor for many Leave voters, though hardly the obsession it has been made out to be; a post-referendum ComRes poll found that 34 per cent said immigration was their main concern, with 53 per cent instead prioritising the ‘ability of Britain to make its own laws’.45 Most of those concerned about immigration, however, did not see the issue in the crudely racist, send-’em-back style of the 1970s. In August 2016 a think-tank poll found a remarkable 84 per cent of British voters wanted EU migrants living and working in the UK to be allowed to stay after Brexit – including 77 per cent of Leave voters.46

The truth is that Britain in 2016 was a far more tolerant and anti-racist society than at any time in its history. Problems of overt racist abuse and violence bear no comparison to the bad old days of the 1970s, when I grew up in a suburban Surrey where racism was not so much acceptable as obligatory, and the 1980s, when some of us on the Left in politics organised to help defend immigrant families under threat of being burned out of London housing estates.

Despite all the warnings of racism on the rise, every serious survey of attitudes to race and ethnicity in British society tells the same story of growing tolerance today. One article published in October 2016 summarised various findings: only one in ten Brits now ‘endorse nakedly racist views’; the proportion of the English public ‘most hostile to immigration’ for racist reasons has shrunk from 13 per cent to 7 per cent; while the World Values Survey now ‘rates Britain as one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world’. None of which prevented the Remainer newspaper in question publishing the article under a headline which declared, contrary to all its own evidence, that post-referendum ‘Britain is becoming mean and small-minded’.47

The political and media panic about an alleged wave of ‘hate crimes’ after the referendum appeared equally dubious. A small handful of serious attacks, which may or may not have had anything to do with the referendum result, were mixed in with reports of many other minor or questionable incidents to create the impression of a brewing pogrom, with some commentators even indulging in horror fantasies about ‘the rise of fascism across the country’.

In October 2016, the Home Office reported a ‘sharp increase’ in hate crime after the referendum; there had been 5,468 hate crimes in July that year, a shocking 41 per cent up on the figures for July 2015. What were these crimes? They were alleged incidents reported to the police, often through phone, email or social media hotlines. They had not been investigated, far less tried as crimes in a court of law.

Instead the police simply record everything they are told about as a hate crime, without any need to question or investigate at all. The Operational Guidance for police forces explains: ‘For recording purposes, the perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident … The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.’48

So, unlike other crimes, if anybody at all says anything at all is a hate crime, the police must record it as one, no ‘evidence of hostility’ required or questions asked. What was that about ‘post-truth’ politics and the downplaying of ‘objective facts’? Indeed, given this subjective system, and the way that the police and the mayor of London made high-profile appeals to report any suspected hate crimes after the referendum, the wonder might be that the statistics for reported incidents showed an increase of only 41 per cent.

This looked like the twenty-first-century equivalent of the mugging panics of the 1980s. Then, every black inner-city youth had been looked at in fear as a potential mugger. Now every suburban white working-class youth was being viewed with similar dread as a potential hate criminal. That one prejudice was an expression of racism and the other ostensibly of anti-racism does not alter the fact that both are expressions of bigotry. In effect the scaremongers were playing a new version of the race card.

In America, protesters angry at the election of Donald Trump lost no time in branding his millions of voters as racists, ‘white supremacists’ and even Nazi sympathisers, and therefore unfit to choose a president.

Alongside the allegation that a vote for Trump was a ‘hate crime’, post-election protesters chanted ‘No Trump, No KKK, No Fascists USA!’. Meanwhile on CNN’s election night coverage, commentator Van Jones made international headlines and inspired many imitators by immediately branding the Trump vote as a racist ‘whitelash’ after eight years of a black president.49 Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tweeted his shock at discovering the extent of the ‘deep hatred in a large segment of the population’.50 Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate magazine, rejected the very suggestion that any Trump voters might be viewed as non-racist, good people: those who once ‘brought their families to gawk and smile’ at racist lynchings, he wrote, were ‘the very model of decent, law-abiding Americana. Hate and racism have always been the province of “good people”.’51

As with the dismissal of ‘low-information voters’, much of this stuff says more about the prejudices of the elites than about political realities. True, the same authoritative exit polls suggest that non-Hispanic white voters backed Trump over Clinton by 58 to 37 per cent. But the headline-grabbing argument about this being due to a racist ‘whitelash’ lasts about as long as it takes to glance at the figures. Both of the main 2016 presidential candidates were white; Hillary Clinton got a lower percentage of white votes than Barack Obama did in 2012 – and Trump got a lower percentage of white votes than Mitt Romney did that year; indeed, as one rational anti-Trump blogger put it, ‘The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than five per cent was white people.’52

As for the idea that anybody voting for Trump must have been a racist, a white supremacist, an ‘alt-right’ zealot or a Ku Klux Klan fan, and that the ghost of Hitler was now stalking the USA – these ridiculous claims make some of the Donald’s own ramblings and rants seem almost reasonable by comparison. (Note to the historically confused: whatever Hitler was – a genocidal Nazi racial supremacist – he could not be accused of being a buffoonish celebrity loudmouth who made up and tore up policies as he went along.)

Take the alleged Ku Klux Klan links, which many anti-Trump protesters seemed keen to highlight. According to Wikipedia, ‘As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.’ Trump, remember, won more than 60 million votes. Which means the top estimate of KKK membership in the entire US is equivalent to less than 0.01 per cent of his support.

No doubt any group of 60 million people will include racists and all manner of others of dubious outlook. However, anybody not blinded by their own prejudices would have to recognise that, as with the UK, attitudes towards race across American society have changed fundamentally in recent decades. In 1960, for example, some 50 per cent of white Americans told Gallup pollsters that they supported racial segregation in schools and would move home if a black family moved in next door; by the late 1990s that figure was down to between 1 and 2 per cent.

As even the film-maker and Democratic Party propagandist Michael Moore was moved to concede, it makes no sense to equate voting Trump with racism: ‘You have to accept that millions of people who voted for Barack Obama – some of them once, some of them twice – changed their minds this time. They’re not racists. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America we live in.’53

Indeed it is – an America ruled over by a Democratic Party administration for the previous eight years. Might that political experience have had something to do with why many Americans were prepared to vote for somebody like Trump this time? Could his election be seen as the legacy of Obama’s and Clinton’s politics in power? No, that was unthinkable. Far simpler to blame it on a racist ‘whitelash’ against Obama’s skin colour.

As a writer on ‘cool’ online magazine Vox declared, ‘Trump’s win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism.’54 How convenient. If the popular power of racism is really deemed ‘unbeatable’, then Clinton and the Democrats surely cannot be blamed for the incredible, catastrophic failure of their campaign.

The dangerous driving force in this discussion is not race hate but fear and loathing of the masses. Branding opposing views as offensively racist or supremacist has become a trendy all-purpose insult, a way to delegitimise votes and opinions that are not to your taste. They can then simply be dismissed, or possibly banned, rather than debated; after all, who wants to engage with racist nutters or Klan fans?

Such permissive use of the insult ‘racist!’ trivialises the term, and diminishes the importance of real racism. It can sound like a simple reversal of old-fashioned racist notions about anything black being inherently inferior.

After the election Gretchen Reiter, who describes herself as a professional ‘Washington insider’ living in rural America, wrote of her anger during the campaign at seeing ‘my friends and family reduced to a label given by elitist, intolerant talking heads: uneducated white people’. For her, ‘the last straw’ came a few days before the election, when she heard a New York Times columnist on PBS say ‘that voters are supporting Trump because of their “gene pool”. It was insulting and ignorant’.55

As insulting and ignorant, some might think, as old-school racial notions about the ‘natural’ inferiority of those enslaved and excluded from power.

‘Democracy’ against the demos

The third common strand in the backlash against the Brexit and Trump votes is the attempt to justify these attacks on the demos – the people – in the name of democracy.

Few in the West feel able explicitly to reject democracy these days. So the trend is to try to redefine its meaning instead. According to this new definition, ‘upholding democracy’ means protecting the political status quo – if necessary, against the people, in whose name democracy exists.

Professor A. C. Grayling was once more to the fore here, loftily informing British MPs that it was their ‘democratic duty and responsibility to reaffirm continuation of the UK’s EU membership’. To do otherwise would apparently ‘subvert our representative democracy and our constitution’.

How, exactly, could it ‘subvert our representative democracy’ to accept the democratically expressed will of 17.4 million people? The key word here is ‘representative’. As we shall see, our society’s idea of democracy has been redefined over the years to mean a system where a political elite can ‘represent’ the people as it sees fit.

Grayling captured the elitist essence of this order by arguing that the EU referendum was only ‘advisory’, that parliament is sovereign, and that most MPs disagreed with their constituents and backed Remain. In which case, he insisted, the constitution decrees that the people’s representatives should ignore the result and vote to remain in the EU, since British democracy was actually about power being in the hands of 645 MPs and the nearly 800 peers in the House of Lords, not the voters.

To accept the referendum result, the wise professor suggested, would be to give in not to democracy but to ‘ochlocracy’; a word meaning ‘government by the populace’ or, in elite-speak, ‘mob rule’, which has barely been used since the oligarchs – the powerful few – of ancient Athens looked down their aristocratic noses in horror at mass democracy.

Grayling was clear that mere numbers are not the decisive issue in a democracy, since a lack of proper education apparently prevents the general public from expressing ‘the general will’, which he seems to think a few people like him are better placed to understand. Oddly, however, the Professor also insisted that sixteen-year-olds should have been given the vote in the referendum; no doubt because he thinks teenagers are better informed, educated and wiser than their elders, and not simply on the assumption that they might have been more likely to vote Remain.

Similar ‘democratic’ arguments for overthrowing the referendum result were advanced by all the other voices arguing against the Brexit vote, many of whom appeared to believe that the granting of democratic rights means you keep people voting until they arrive at the right result.

The Brexit-bashers all seemed keen to draw parallels between the Leave campaign and the Trump crusade in the States. Yet it was their refusal to accept the referendum outcome that more closely chimed with the pre-election attitude of Donald ‘I’ll respect the result – if I win’ Trump.

There were the handful of backers who funded a legal bid to get judges to rule that, regardless of the ‘advisory’ referendum result, the government could not trigger Brexit without the backing of MPs and lords in parliament. In true Newspeak-style, this stunt was called ‘The People’s Challenge’. Thus the real people’s challenge to the technocratic political elite, as seen in the referendum result, was threatened by a self-interested ‘People’s Challenge’ and dressed up in the finery of the Royal Courts of Justice. In November 2016, three high court judges ruled in the legal claimants’ favour, and declared that the government must have the approval of parliament before it could trigger Article 50 and begin the Brexit process. In effect the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales took it upon themselves to shelve the democratic decision of the electorate. The people might have spoken, but three law lords had told them to shush and let their betters talk among themselves. This was a microcosm of the trend for unelected bodies to assume authority over the demos.

Then there was the apparently four-million-strong online petition calling on parliament to hold another referendum that would require a larger margin of victory (a petition initially launched before the referendum by a Leaver who feared a narrow Remain win, which suggests that faith in popular democracy is not necessarily stronger on the other side). When this demand was debated in parliament, as petitions which garner more than 100,000 signatures must be, Tim Farron MP, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, said (seemingly with a straight face), ‘We demand that the British people should have their say on the final deal in a referendum!’56 Never mind that the people had just had their say in a referendum; that could not be final, since too many people had misspoken and said ‘Leave!’ Not for the first time it might occur to some that the Lib Dems have a strange idea of the meaning of liberal democracy.

In similar vein was the letter signed by around a thousand top lawyers, demanding that parliament must decide (i.e., vote for Remain). As the Queen’s Counsel who organised this initiative, Philip Kolvin QC, explained, ‘In times of crisis people often turn to lawyers to ask them how we should behave in society.’57 Of course we do. The notion that the opinions of 1,000 lawyers on ‘how we should behave in society’ could outweigh those of 17.4 million voters mostly without law degrees summed up the some-are-more-equal-than-others essence of the backlash against Brexit. Even though this top legal advice was unusually offered free of charge, the price to pay for a free society accepting such guidance would be far too high.

In parliament, meanwhile, a cross-party alliance – including Labour MPs such as leadership contender Owen Smith and Tory lords such as Baroness Patience Wheatcroft – was busily conjuring up constitutional and ‘democratic’ arguments as to why they should act to ignore, overthrow or otherwise seek to reverse the referendum result.

Leading Labour MP David Lammy wrote that ‘we cannot usher in rule by plebiscite which unleashes the “wisdom” of resentment and prejudice reminiscent of 1930s Europe’.58 Note the inverted commas around the word wisdom when applied to the masses. For the likes of Lammy, it appeared, overturning the EU referendum result was now on a par with defending democracy against fascism.

This was a sure sign of what democracy has come to mean: a hollowed-out, narrowly defined system of rule which denies a meaningful say to the demos – the people – from whom the idea takes its name, and concentrates control in the hands of an elite that looks more like the privileged oligarchy of ancient Athens. Where the Greeks practised direct democracy, we have long been told that representative democracy is better suited to modern times. Now it seems we are left with an increasingly unrepresentative form of democracy – and when people revolt against the orders of the elite, the response is to try to make our democracy less representative yet.

Those arguing in the language of constitutional law to delay or reverse Brexit boasted impressive legal and academic credentials. Yet in the language of real democracy, their arguments against accepting the referendum result were bogus. They constituted a legalistic mask to disguise the authoritarian intent.

The referendum was in no way merely an ‘advisory’ measure, to be ignored or accepted at parliament’s pleasure. It was legislated for by parliament in a 2015 Act, passed with overwhelming support, which made no mention of a referendum being advisory, and conveyed the clear understanding that the government would give effect to the result. If there was any doubt about that, during the referendum campaign the Conservative government which commanded a majority of MPs sent out a propaganda pamphlet to every household, clearly stating the government’s belief (backed by the official opposition parties) that Britain should remain in the UK. This document concluded: ‘This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.’59 Nothing advisory or open to interpretation there.

The issue of parliamentary sovereignty became the major smokescreen for attacking democracy. The apparently lofty and learned argument is that the UK parliament is sovereign, so that the government could not act to implement Brexit without gaining the approval of MPs and Lords. Under Britain’s largely unwritten constitution, however, ultimate sovereignty still rests with the sovereign of this constitutional monarchy, exercised through the device of the Crown-in-parliament. The Royal Prerogative gives the government the power to do all manner of things in the name of the Crown, from waging war to signing treaties, without parliamentary approval.

The royal power that the Royal Prerogative grants to a government should be a big problem for anybody seriously concerned about democracy in Britain. It is the main reason why some of us have always favoured abolishing the monarchy. Curiously, however, it had never seemed much of a problem before the Brexit vote to those arguing against accepting the referendum result. Leading Remainers such as ex-New Labour prime minister Tony Blair and his allies certainly never had a problem with using the Royal Prerogative to launch destructive foreign wars while in office. Yet now they suddenly object to its use to pursue Brexit.

Most strikingly, few of the new champions of parliamentary sovereignty appeared in the slightest bit bothered about having that sovereignty overridden via the EU, by both European bureaucrats and British governments, through the previous forty years. It seems that they only became excited about the need to defend parliamentary sovereignty against the people.

These pseudo-democratic arguments were just a device to discredit the referendum which had been a genuine exercise in mass democracy. By August 2016, Labour front-bench MP Barry Gardiner could even accuse the new Tory prime minister Theresa May of acting ‘with the arrogance of a Tudor monarch’ by insisting that she could implement a form of Brexit without a further vote of MPs.60 Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Mrs May was a Remain campaigner who did not want Brexit; Mr Gardiner may have studied some different history from me, but I do not recall the well-known Tudor monarch Henry VIII reluctantly breaking with the Church of Rome or beheading two wives and assorted enemies because the people demanded it in a referendum.

These issues highlight bigger problems with British democracy, on both sides of the Brexit debate. For one side, it appears, representative democracy means that MPs should have the right to do as they see fit, regardless of the referendum result, in our increasingly unrepresentative system. For the other side, it seems, the Royal Prerogative gives the government the right and power to do as it pleases – including either implementing or delaying Brexit – not in the name of the people, but of the Crown.

Neither side measures up to the standard of meaningful democratic politics. But however we see these problems, the solution to the ‘democratic deficit’ in the UK cannot be even less democracy. That is what it would mean if we were to allow the elites to undermine or ignore the clearly expressed will of the majority who voted in the EU referendum. (If politicians now claim that 52 per cent of those who voted is not a legitimate mandate, by the way, then the UK has not had a legitimate government in living memory, since no party since the Second World War has ever achieved as many as 50 per cent of the votes cast.)

We need to find new ways to bring British democracy to life and make it mean more. Instead we are faced with a situation where democracy means so little that the Left can join with Tories in looking to the House of Lords to thwart the popular Brexit vote.

The unelected, unaccountable character of the upper chamber ought to be a problem for anybody who believes in democracy, making the Lords prime candidates to be voted into the dustbin of history. Yet that, it seems, is precisely why the unelected peers are considered so well qualified to ‘defend democracy’ against the referendum mob! As Baroness Wheatcroft spelled it out, the House of Lords was better placed to lead a ‘rebellion’ against Brexit because it is unrepresentative and unelected. (The Conservatives, despite winning a majority in the House of Commons in the 2015 general election, had only a minority of 254 peers out of an inflated total of 798 in the Lords, while the openly pro-EU Liberal Democrats, then reduced to a rump of just seven elected MPs, could still boast 105 unelected members swanning about in the House of Lords.)

Baroness Wheatcroft gave the game away when she boasted that, ‘with no constituents to fear’, the Lords would be freer than the Commons to vote against the wishes of the electorate. It is fear of the mass of constituents that drives anti-democrats of every political stripe to seek refuge in the Lords, while claiming to be upholding parliamentary democracy.61

After the American election, the reaction against Trump voters also adopted the bogus language of democracy to disguise its anti-democratic intent.

Almost as soon as the overall result of the 8 November elections became clear, the cry went up that Trump would not be a legitimate occupant of the White House. Film-maker Michael Moore spoke for many top Democrats when he denounced the Donald as ‘an illegitimate president’ who ‘does not have the vote of the people’.62

Anti-Trump protesters angrily pointed out that, while the Republican candidate had won a majority in the electoral college – the system the US uses to elect its president indirectly – Democratic Party candidate Clinton had won a larger share of the popular vote. By the end of November, with late votes still being counted, Clinton had some two million more votes than Trump – about 2 per cent of the total – but the way these votes were distributed between states meant the Republican had easily carried the electoral college by 306 votes to 232.

Within days of the election, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that one in three Democrat voters believed Trump’s win was ‘illegitimate’, with 27 per cent of them feeling ‘strongly’ about it.63 Those feelings appeared strongest within the metropolitan strongholds of the Democratic elite, where both their votes and media-focused protests against the result were concentrated.

Those modern tools of passive political activism, the online petitions, quickly began gathering support, calling on the 538 members of the electoral college to go rogue – or act as ‘faithless electors’ – and refuse to endorse president-elect Trump when they congregated on 19 December, even if voters in their state had supported him. The largest petition of this sort on Change.org quickly gathered more than 4.5 million signatures, demanding that the electoral college make Hillary Clinton president because ‘SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE’. Meanwhile college electors reported being ‘bombarded’ with phone, email and social-media messages calling on them to ignore their electorates’ wishes and vote against Trump. Some Democrat electors themselves admitted to lobbying for their counterparts in the college to vote for ‘Anybody But Trump’ and switch support to a more ‘respectable’ Republican such as Mitt Romney.

As with the anti-Brexit forces in the UK, the anti-Trump protesters were using the language of representative democracy in an instrumental way, to justify their attempt to overturn a result they did not like.

The US electoral college does indeed represent a strange, distorted and undemocratic brand of representative democracy. That is precisely why it was established in the first place – to provide a potential brake on popular sentiments of which the US elites do not approve.

The Founding Fathers who led the American revolution against British rule from 1776 and established the US as an independent republic were fearful of ‘too much’ popular democracy. They created a system of ‘checks and balances’ that could, if necessary, restrain the people in the name of representation. As James Madison wrote, the US system was founded to give the political elite powers to stymie the electorate when people were ‘stimulated by some irregular passion’ to ‘call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn’.

The constitutional checks and balances were put in place to check the power of the people and to counterbalance the will of the majority. The powerful Supreme Court is one arm of this system. Another is the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress which gives two seats to every US state, regardless of population size, and thus enables smaller, rural and generally more conservative states to outvote the big urban centres.

And another elitist arm is the electoral college, through which electors, nominated from each state on the basis of the election result, cast the final vote for the next president. This likewise favours conservative smaller states and also gives a few hundred electors – members of the political establishment appointed by the major parties – the potential to overturn the election result.

The electoral college has never done that, although there have now been five elections where the new president lost the popular vote. The most recent one pre-Trump was in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush became president despite winning fewer votes than Democratic challenger Al Gore. Some researchers claim there was also a sixth occasion, in 1960, when Republican Richard Nixon might have won more votes than iconic Democratic president John F. Kennedy, but the close-run result was left ambiguous by the confusing electoral system in the state of Alabama.

Despite the electoral college’s evident democratic shortcomings, however, there have been few serious attempts to reform it. America’s powerful elites still prefer a system with inbuilt brakes that can prevent popular sentiment running riot.

Yet there was little that was democratic about the sudden upsurge of protests about the US system after the 2016 election. Those happy enough with the electoral college when it delivers results they want were simply furious because it allowed for the election of the despised Donald. Indeed, their demand for 538 members of the electoral college to overturn the votes of 62 million ‘ill-informed’ Trump voters represents a new face of anti-democratic politics in the US and the West.

The sudden outburst against the ‘illegitimate’ election result was really no more democratic than the electoral college itself. Few of those protesting or signing petitions were concerned about the system until it enabled Trump to win. We might recall how, before election day, these were the people outraged by Trump’s suggestion that he might not recognise the result if he did not win.

Yet overnight, leading Democrats would have us believe they were genuine democrats who just wanted to uphold the popular vote. How? By using the undemocratic electoral college to overturn the election result. Their loud talk of Trump being an ‘illegitimate’ president was really a coded attack on the millions of deplorable Americans who cast their ‘illegitimate’ votes for him, rather than being any principled defence of American democracy.

Bill de Blasio, the Democrat mayor of New York city, told CBS it was ‘inconceivable’ that Clinton had been denied the presidency despite winning more votes: ‘It doesn’t make sense. And it’s supposed to be in our constitution: one person, one vote. That’s not what happened here.’64 Anybody might have imagined that this system had just been invented to get the Republican candidate elected, rather than being the same one under which every Democratic Party president has entered the White House. Everybody’s vote has never been of equal value under a system designed to restrain democracy in the name of representation. These sudden converts to electoral reform were only objecting now because too many of those persons had cast their one vote for Trump.

The same seemed true of the high-level demands for recounts of votes in several key states, supposedly because the polls might have been ‘hacked’ by Russian cyber-terrorists. Can anybody imagine such ‘principled’ protests in defence of American democracy being backed by the establishment if Clinton had been elected?

Endorsing claims that Russia somehow hacked the US election ‘to promote a Trump win’, one liberal blogger announced that ‘the only Constitutional solution available to us is for the electoral college to serve the function that the Framers intended for it, namely to serve as a check on elections gone wrong’.65 Thus the radical wing of American liberalism lined up with the most conservative Founding Fathers in their determination to halt the ‘wrong’ election results. What ultimately unites them is contempt for millions of voters whom they cannot comprehend.

Of course, Trump is no champion of American democracy – commentators had fun unearthing his tweets calling for a ‘revolution’ to overthrow Obama’s election win in 2012.66 He is an illiberal at heart who poses a potential threat to precious liberties such as freedom of speech.

But the backlash against ‘illegitimate’ Trump voters is a sham defence of democracy that is just another attack on the independence of the demos. Anybody must have the legitimate right to protest against a president they don’t support or to demand genuine democratic reforms. Demanding backroom deals among the political elite to overturn an election result you don’t like, however, is potentially far more dangerous to the future of democracy than a President Trump.

However the arguments have been packaged, there is one underlying message of the backlash against Brexit and Trump: that ‘too much’ democracy is dangerous. The elites do not trust the mass of voters because they believe we are too unintelligent, misinformed and emotional to make the right decisions on important issues. And they do not really trust a lot of politicians either, who they think only win elections by pandering to the base appetites and instincts of the vulgar voters. An anti-democratic prejudice about lying ‘populist’ political demagogues and stupid voters is taking hold across the political and cultural elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Open debate about borders

The Brexit referendum vote was not a racist backlash but a revolt of the Others. It opened up the opportunity for a new kind of political debate about the future of our society, involving many who had previously been excluded from public life. Instead the reaction from the Clerisy and the political elites was to use it as an argument for even less democracy and openness in future: they want no more simple referendums on big issues, a bigger role for the courts in policing politics, official fact-checkers to sanitise ‘post-truth’ politics by restricting freedom of speech.

But more free speech and democracy, not less, is the best possible way forward, to give us a chance of addressing divided opinions, settling political differences and deciding which way to go. There is no point calling for unity and then demanding silence from dissenting viewpoints on any side. Democracy is about divided opinions and debate as to the way we shape our future.

An open democratic debate, for example, involving all opinions, represents our only chance of resolving a divisive issue such as immigration in UK and Western politics today.

In recent years, the prevailing view in British public life has been that anybody who raises the issue of immigration risks being branded a racist. This has suppressed debate on the question. Those deluded enough to imagine that was the same thing as winning the argument for open borders have had a rude awakening.

The first thing we need to do is clarify the issue through a clash of opinions rather than an exchange of insults. Concerns about immigration in the UK today generally have little in common with old-fashioned send-them-back racism. Instead mass immigration to the UK, especially from Eastern Europe, has become a symbol of the way that many people feel their world has been changed without anybody asking them. They have woken up to find that their communities are disintegrating, their traditional values trashed from on high. Some of their new neighbours may have their own native tongues, but the ones who really seem to speak a foreign language are the UK elites ignoring the UK’s own ‘ghastly people’.

In particular since the New Labour government of the late 1990s, mass immigration to the UK has been encouraged and organised from the top down, but without any public debate about its benefits or costs to society. Indeed any attempt at discussing immigration has been effectively barred as racist. Think of Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, unknowingly recorded dismissing a lifelong Labour voter as ‘some bigoted woman’ because she asked him about Romanian immigration on camera in the 2010 general election campaign.

Britain’s borders have effectively been opened by the state, not as a consequence of governments or experts winning an argument for mass immigration, but instead by avoiding one and going ahead without public consent. In this context the immigration issue has become another symbol of the yawning gap between millions of people and the political establishment, of the absence of democracy and open public debate. You did not need to be a racist to revolt against that state of affairs.

Those who want a more liberal, open society would do better trying to win an argument for one than condemning those who disagree with them as xenophobes and thugs. The fact is that the precondition for any progressive policy on migration is establishing democratic control over borders – and then winning a democratic debate about the need to open them. The alternative of leaving it to the closed world of courts and Euro-commissions can only make matters worse.

Free speech and democratic debate are our best tools to tackle the political and cultural divide in our societies and arrive at some conclusions. Yet we live in a culture of conformism where the motto of the age is You Can’t Say That, ‘offensive’ opinions are frowned upon or banned, and ideas that stray from the straight and increasingly narrow path approved by the Clerisy are ruled out-of-bounds.

One incident that highlighted this divide after the EU referendum came with the prosecution of the former England footballer Paul Gascoigne, ex-working-class hero, fallen national treasure and psychiatrically challenged alcoholic, for a race-hate crime. In 2015, during a desperate attempt to raise funds, the sad ghost of Gascoigne had staged An Evening With Gazza show in Wolverhampton. While on stage he said to his black security guard, ‘Can you smile please, I can’t see you.’ For cracking this unfunny and insensitive joke, Gascoigne was hauled into court in September 2016 and convicted of the ‘racially aggravated’ offence of using ‘threatening or abusive words’. Most telling were the threatening words used by the judge in sentencing Gazza. M’lud made clear that he was making an example of the faded star to send a message to others. ‘We live in the twenty-first century,’ the judge proclaimed. ‘Grow up with it or keep your mouth closed!’67 It is not necessary to defend what Gascoigne said in order to see that sort of censorious court order as no laughing matter.

You might interpret this sorry incident as evidence of the hidden epidemic of white working-class racism behind the Brexit vote. Or, alternatively, as a sign of the contempt with which the white working class and its old habits – such as telling naughty jokes – are held in high places. That helped to provoke the pro-Brexit backlash among millions who had had enough of being told to ‘keep your mouth closed’ by those who look down on them from the judges’ bench of life.