Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of

Elsewhere the Leave vote was dismissed by leading UK liberal writers as a ‘howl of rage’,18 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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.