Democracy Has Always Been Post-Factual

In my earlier post on Brexit, I pointed to this comment, which has gotten a lot of attention. I agree with what the comment said about swapping elites (its first point) and the impact on the young (its second). But I don’t agree with the third:

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel.

I’m not saying that the Brexit side told the truth about the downsides of exiting. Indeed, within hours of victory, Ukip leader Nigel Farage admitted a key claim made in Brexit propaganda, that the UK would save £350 million a week that could be put into social services like the National Health Service (which got cut significantly under Cameron) was a “mistake.”

I’m not even saying that this election, in the UK, was not exception in terms of the bald propaganda unleashed. I haven’t seen that measured, but everything I’ve heard reports that it was awful.

Still, what does it mean that we live in a post-factual democracy? I thought, at first, that the US is just ahead of its cousin, in that we’ve had WMD and birther lies for over a decade. But the UK had the very same WMD lies. Indeed, both countries have proudly lied about national security secrets for decades, centuries in England.

Plus, as I thought back in US history, I couldn’t get to a time when democracy didn’t depend on some key, big lies. Remarkably, they’re still some of the very same lies mobilized in the Brexit vote. You don’t get a United States, you don’t get a British Empire, without spewing a lot of lies about the inferiority of black (brown, beige, continental) men. You don’t get America, as it currently exists, without the myth of American exceptionalism, the unique national myth that has served to root an increasingly diverse former colony. You don’t get Britain without certain beliefs, traced back to Matthew Arnold and earlier, about the enobling force of British culture.

Those myths are precisely what have driven the democracy of both countries for a long time. They were a way of imposing discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion such that less privileged members of those included in the myth would buy in and tolerate the other inequities without undue violence.

They’re really the same myths deployed by some in Brexit: the immigrants, not the austerity policies, are taking your jobs and disrupting your English way of life.

Perhaps we’re moving closer to a fact-based democracy. Access to rebut sanctioned lies is more readily accessible, though the scaffold of spying makes it harder to release, except in bulk. We’re becoming more cosmopolitan, too. At least some voted Remain for that reason — the old nationalism has been dented in the decades of a failed European experiment.

But make no mistake, the myths have always been there. We’re still trying to break free.

Brexit: Unicorn-Sniffing Naifs Deprived of Their Future

As you surely know, Britain voted to Brexit the European Union yesterday, confounding predictions and setting off a great deal of uncertainty.

One detail people are focusing most closely on is the age differential shown in a YouGov exit poll. It showed that voters 18-24 voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. “The younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries,” a widely linked FT comment laid out. “We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied.”

That sentiment, and the overwhelming support for Remain, has been celebrated as wise by the punditocracy — and it probably is.

But the same people celebrating this Millennial view — one that embraced tolerance and opportunity — often as not attacked the overwhelming support by American Millennials for Bernie Sanders. That disproportionate support, coming from a much smaller part of the electorate but by very similar margins, was deemed a naive belief in empty promises (promises, of course, that largely resembled adopting the policies that the EU used to and in some places still represents).

I suspect the reality is that, on top of a real cosmopolitanism among younger people, both votes were just a vote for perceived self-interest, no more or less wise than the votes of their older, less cosmopolitan parents.

Still, those celebrating the UK’s Millennials for their wisdom might give some consideration as to why the underlying cosmopolitanism and interest in European style social policies of the young would be perceived self-interest on both sides of the pond.

There Is No [Easy] Exit

Not an European scholar or sage. Have tried to pay attention to the Brexit question across the pond, but unsure how well I have done so. Generally, however, it has struck me that, given real problems either way for the Brits, the best choice was to stay in the EU.

Really, there was a definitive majority to join then, so what is the plan now?

Tell me why the secrets have disappeared
cover up the traces of wasted years,
the traces of wasted years
…
build it up alibies for the damned
hide away, don’t ever reveal your plan.

So, what is the plan now for the always diminished, but oh so egotistically adventurous Brits, given they are woefully short on empire and hegemonic power? Oh so much like the terminally behind the queue United States?

Isn’t that a lesson the US ought not heed? If not decades ago, maybe finally now?

The UK may be leaving the collective, but do they really have an exit plan? The number of modalities in which they simply cannot have a great and immediate plan are too number to plow through.

There is no easy exit. Despite the vote in the UK. Germany and France make it clear this is not easy.

Lock it up,
standing behind closed doors
give it up,
no hiding place anymore

The value of the British pound and stock prices in Asia plummeted as financial markets absorbed the news.

I don’t know how it is going to be in the UK going forward. But if the vote is what it looks, the Brexit has occurred.

On the whole, pretty scary proposition, and the effort to get there seems much like the brain dead Trumpian movement afoot here in the States; i.e. shortsighted, uninformed and stupid. Hope I am wrong.

But here we all are, on both sides of the pond, looking inordinately stupid and shortsighted.

The world is being consumed by Trumpalos and Juggalos.

There is no exit.

[If you don’t know this band in the video featured, you should. They are The Angels, and this song is perfectly prescient for today even if from long ago.]