Brexit: What happened?

A journalist explains it

By Rolf Dumke

I have enjoyed British novelist Ian McEwan’s excellent novels Amsterdam and Saturday and others because of their ironic, satirical portraits of British society. And now, in a February 1 article in The Guardian (“Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country’s history, is done”), McEwan tries to disperse the fog of nationalistic populism, or “populist stardust” that has confused debate on Brexit in the UK. In the attempt, he enumerates more than enough reasons to convince me that Brexit was a huge mistake, but how Brexit nevertheless happened remains open to discussion.

    I have excerpted a couple of paragraphs from McEwan’s article to whet your appetite:

How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion.” How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.
   ...Only a few years ago, asked to list the nation’s ills – wealth gap, ailing NHS, north-south imbalance, crime, terrorism, austerity, housing crisis etc – most of us would not have thought to include our membership of the EU. How happy we were in 2012, in the afterglow of our successful Olympics. We weren’t thinking then of Brussels. It was, in Guy Verhofstadt’s famous term, a “cat-fight” within the Tory party that got us going. Those cats had been fighting each other for decades. When they dragged us in and urged us to take sides, we had a collective nervous breakdown; then sufficient numbers wanted the distress to go away and “get Brexit done.” Repeated ad nauseam by the prime minister it almost seemed impolite to ask why.

Part of the “how,” is that modern newspapers, cable TV programs, and social media often help to devalue national debates by ignoring or falsifying facts. We may have reached a critical juncture for the functioning of our political and economic institutions when open, rational debate has become so difficult that mistakes like Brexit can happen.

Jürgen Habermas, born 1929

    Over 50 years ago, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote an influential paper on the “public sphere” in which a society debates and discusses national issues. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, such discussion began in coffee houses. The rise of bourgeois capitalism in Europe led to consumers having equal rights and paying the same prices for goods. Buying a cup coffee in a coffee house gave one the right to participate in ongoing discussions. These discussions were open and therefore also represented many points of view.
    In the 20th Century it moved into major newspapers, radio, and TV. Habermas argued that such open discussions were part of Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment, and were a precondition for political democracy. See Habermas’ 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

In our 21st Century, much of the public sphere is dominated by social media. Recent papers discuss how they have transformed Habermas’ public sphere into many splinters of news streams, which may merge but complicate public discourse. A sociological view is that Habermas’ public sphere is not destroyed by social media, but fragmented, with some overlapping of the fragments.
    Here are three papers that explore this topic:

• “Is Habermas on Twitter? Social Media and the Public Sphere,” by Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield (Chapter 4 in The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, edited by Taylor and Francis, 2015)
• “Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere?,” by Christian Fuchs (Chapter 8 of his book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 2014)
• “Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas,” by Craig Calhoun (a chapter of the book Institutional Change in the Public Sphere: Views on the Nordic Model, edited by Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen, Dominika Polkowska, Andrea S. Dauber-Griffin, Adam Leverton, De Gruyter, 2017)

But this literature ignores the deliberate lying and distortion that the new media allow – especially committed by right-wing purveyors – and fails to acknowledge how seriously such lies and distortions hinder rational debate. Academics lack the immediate insight of journalists like McEwan that we now live in a populist world that is drifting toward rule by authoritarians. Habermas himself has not faced this issue, but has instead been wasting his time on a huge new, two-volume study of the history of religion.
    We live in a pseudo-Orwellian world where, as consumers and social actors, we have been precisely identified and are increasingly manipulated politically by clever apps. Our democracies are threatened. Brexit is a case in point, and I highly recommend Ian McEwan’s article for a better understanding of the huge mistake the UK has made in leaving the European Union.

Copyright © 2020 by Rolf Dumke