ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:Can some locals please explain to me the validity, or not, of this particular The Atlantic (American perspective) article on Brexit?
I have been watching this thread for weeks, and not being familiar with UK politics, it is difficult to understand the nuance apparent in the posts. I get the basics, but not enough to venture whether or not this article makes a good point, or doesn't, or has a clue, or not.
At a basic level the article understands that Brexit is fundamentally a symptom of an underlying culture war, but doesn't even begin to assess what that culture war is about or what its causes might be.
To be fair, I'm not sure many people even here in the UK are able to look beneath the surface of 'are you my tribe or not?'
The article does offer the disturbing yet painfully-likely prospect of this culture war going on far into a post-Brexit future, as the leaders of the new tribes (replacing old left-right) look for new totemic issues to solidify their support. In the US you have 'drain the swamp', border control and abortion / gay rights as totemic issues. Beyond the EU, I'm not sure we have anything with that level of intensity for populists to unite around yet, but as stumuz points out, behind everything else is wealth inequality and democratic exclusion, and populism tends to use these to sustain power without really wanting to fix them.
I'm reminded of my experience growing up in Yorkshire listening to reports of The Troubles from Northern Ireland. From my naive perspective their tribes seemed bizarre. We had regulated capitalism vs free-market capitalism. They had protestant vs catholic, and were building walls between streets and killing each other. Why couldn't they just get along? Well, now we English finally understand.
My fear about populism is not that its root cause isn't justified, but that it doesn't really benefit from fixing any of the problems that give rise to it. It offers a valid critique of elites that have taken the people for granted for far too long, but then it begins to define as elite or traitor anyone from any walk of life who disagrees with their language and hostility to anyone outside their tribe, and we end up with the 1984 need to always be at war with one group or another to justify their leadership and/or failure to change anything.
The Tories, terrible as they have often been on the subject of social justice and financial support for the poor, at least had a strong 'One Nation' element that tried to include even those who would rarely or never vote for them. Likewise, the Blairites of 'New Labour' at least tried to lead from the centre, even though they were too comfortable in their middle-class self-righteousness. These are now all decried as elites even though they have no power except to moan from the margins, and mostly have only themselves to blame.
Whatever happens with Brexit, it will not solve any of these problems. Populists will not solve them either, since they depend on them for power. But what's needed is certainly not a return to 'the status quo' of educated elites slapping each other on the back and ignoring the people.
There's been a similar development in the Church as a realisation has emerged in some quarters that clergy as leaders are far too prone to seeing ourselves as hosts and owners, welcoming in 'those poor people' from outside, and seeing our first task as 'making them like us'. In reality, the Church belongs to God, and we clergy are the least of all the guests God has invited to his banquet. Where this kind of humility is at the heart of how we serve and love each other, churches are able to become inclusive places of solidarity and support, rather than hierarchical finger-wagging competitions.
I therefore hope for a similar realisation in political life. I don't want the reactionary revenge of the old centrist elites. I don't want to see political life become populists vs centrists forever. I want to see another group emerge that doesn't draw its power from finding endless enemies to demonise and exclude, or draw its power from smug educated elitism. What I'm probably longing for is humility, wisdom and virtue in public life, something that can reach across the tribes we find ourselves in and empathise with other perspectives and experiences. I don't really see even the germination of a seed of such things at the moment, in any of our parties, which is perhaps why I hope for a new electoral system to allow for a more diverse spectrum of representative voices before we become ever more entrenched in a two-tribe winner-takes-all hellscape of our own making.
