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,