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