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

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

(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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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.