“Fromage not Farage”, “I’ve Seen Better Cabinets at Ikea”: the signs at the Put It to the People march were particularly British in their humour. The present crisis in the United Kingdom is, however, no laughing matter. It reflects very real social and political problems and deep divisions about the future of the country. The argument over remain or leave is also between the winners and losers in globalisation.

In the 1960s former US secretary of state Dean Acheson said Britain had lost an empire and was yet to find a role. For a time it appeared Britain could be the pivot of Europe and the Atlantic world. Britain would be part of Europe on its own terms but also have a special relationship with the United States, with the British acting, as Harold Macmillan said, as the Greeks to the Americans’ Romans. Membership of the European Union has disappointed many and the special relationship is today as flimsy as the friendship between Donald Trump and Theresa May. So where does Britain go now?

That discussion is part of a much larger debate across the globe about the nature and direction of societies. Fears or hopes about change, hostility or openness to immigrants, confidence in the future or a longing for a simpler past, these are not unique to Britain. We have seen this before in history, when rapid change destroys people’s livelihoods dislocates communities and leaves a widespread sense of unease and, often, resentment. The debate over the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s was not just about tariffs and meeting the demands for cheaper food, it was a struggle between the landed interests and the new industrialists over the future shape of British society. Before the first world war rapid industrialisation and the growth of international trade created great opportunities and great inequalities. The new working classes pushed peacefully where they could and violently where they could not for fairer conditions and a political voice. Small shopkeepers and artisans or landowners who were losing out to competition sought refuge in parties that promised to turn back the clock. Social conservatives looked back nostalgically to the middle ages.

British humour … placards from the Put It To The People March in central London on 23 March. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

History, or a version of it, is both a refuge in such times and a weapon. Many of the Brexiters have a particular reading of British history, that the British are not part of Europe but a proudly independent and unique people who look out to a wider world. That ignores the many and ancient ties between these islands and the continent. We have seen such simple explanations before: in the 19th century the pope was plotting to take over the world; no, it was the Jews or possibly the Freemasons. Irish immigrants brought typhoid, the Chinese opium. And, then as now, there was anger at remote and unresponsive elites and plenty of politicians willing to capitalise on that.

Demagogues often seize control of the political debate in troubled times. Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna before 1914, mobilised the lower classes by attacking capitalism and the Jews. A young Adolf Hitler watched and learned. The “people” are defined as those who are with or like “us”. The fascists used the language of inclusion and exclusion in the interwar years, and today we have Beppe Grillo and Marine Le Pen who talk about the “real” people. In her extraordinary recent outburst, Theresa May claimed to speak for the “people” against parliament. Populism is seductively simple and promises easy solutions. Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917 with the three words: “Bread, Land, Peace”. He promised that Soviet power plus electrification would build the new socialist paradise. It never came.

The past has lessons for the present but not the ones populists promote. It should warn us to question sweeping claims, conspiracy theories, or easy answers. Above all the past reminds us to be careful what we wish for.

• Margaret Macmillan’s books include Peacemakers and The Uses and Abuses of History.

‘The architects of the Reformation would have been saddened by the isolationism of Brexit’

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Outward looking … Thomas Cromwell promoted a new internationalism. Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Photograph: Fine Art/Corbis via Getty Images

Over a year or two from 1533, Henry VIII abruptly ended a millennium of ties between the pope and the English church, by a series of acts in the Westminster and Dublin parliaments. Through force of personality plus threats and bluster, he and his minister Thomas Cromwell bullied MPs, peers, bishops and abbots into agreeing that the king of England had always actually been head of the church, but neither he nor his subjects had noticed, thanks to the cunning Roman pontiffs. All this was in aid of unilaterally declaring Henry’s near-quarter-century of marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void, so he could marry Anne Boleyn regardless of papal censure, and beget a male heir.

This reckless move threatened dire consequences for the realm’s international standing. Merchants were aghast at the prospect of ruin for England’s main international trade with the European lands ruled by Queen Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman emperor (a much more powerful monarch than Henry). As Henry committed ever more extreme provocations, horrified neighbours on the European mainland might even have gone to war with him. Thomas Cromwell forwarded the plan with customary efficiency, despite having no enthusiasm for the Boleyn marriage.

Henry’s break with Rome led to a Protestant English Reformation – but no thanks to Henry. He was emphatically not a Protestant; in fact, he burned Protestants for heresy. The Reformation flourished in England in spite and not because of him. Did Reformation amount to Brexit? No. When Anne was executed in 1536, Cromwell, a discreet but thoroughgoing Protestant, made sure that there was no return to the pope. Instead he manipulated the king’s delight in his newfound leadership of the English church to promote a new internationalism shaped by Protestant religion. The European Reformation first exploded in 1517 in northern Germany, yet thereafter it transcended and broke down local boundaries. The Reformations of England and its neighbouring kingdom, Scotland, were just part of a greater whole.

Protestants resisted breaking England’s natural, wider ties to Europe. They would have been bewildered and saddened by the isolationism and narrow vision of Brexit. They were looking for radical reform in the church, but once corruption and errors had been remedied, the aim was a fresh continent-wide unity, not a muddle of division and weakness. Both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland were part of “Reformed” Protestantism, which went further than Martin Luther in its break with the past. Their partners in an international movement were the other reformed churches in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Poland and as far east across the continent as Transylvania. England in the decades after the 1530s took back control and used it to become a new sort of European.

• Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell is published by Penguin.

‘As America’s founding fathers show, declaring independence is one thing, making a success of it quite another’

Maya Jasanoff

Parliamentary blues … in a recent speech Theresa May claimed to speak for the people. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/Xinhua/Barcroft Images

Brexit campaigners liked to portray themselves as latter-day American revolutionaries, asserting “independence” from the EU’s imperialistic diktats. American independence does invite parallels with Brexit – but not for the reasons Brexiters think. Like Brexit, the American Revolution polarised parliament and the British public. Prime Minister Lord North, a skilled parliamentarian, called an early election on the eve of war in 1774 and successfully shored up Commons support for his policy – just what May notoriously failed to do. But as the war of independence progressed he could not contain the disputes deepened by Britain’s losing military effort. Hardliners (led by George III) refused to make peace; the parliamentary opposition (led by the charismatic Charles James Fox) took to wearing blue and buff, the colours of George Washington’s army. Meanwhile North’s ineffectiveness condemned him to a historic berth as one of Britain’s worst prime ministers.

The 52% who voted leave might fruitfully learn from the United States’s founding fathers that declaring independence is one thing, but making a success of it quite another. The new US had vulnerable frontiers and remained heavily dependent on trade with Britain. In 1794, President George Washington dispatched chief justice John Jay to negotiate a treaty with Britain that earned the US “most favoured nation” trading status, and required Britain to withdraw from forts along America’s northwest frontier. The American public roundly condemned the Jay treaty as a pandering appeasement of British interests. But with the president’s backing, the senate narrowly ratified the treaty, averting hostilities with Britain and allowing the young republic to consolidate its resources.

The 48% who supported remain can point to American independence as a classic example of how every version of nationalism – no matter how inclusive its aspirations – rests on forms of exclusion. The republic was founded by slave owners, a hypocrisy called out by Samuel Johnson: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” As the US marched westward in fulfilment of its “manifest destiny”, it launched genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples. The country so famously open to immigrants has repeatedly shut demonised “others” out. To this day, racism permeates the justice system and access to voting.

The Brexiter paradox, of course, is that the very same people trying to conjure up the American revolutionary spirit are bloated with delusional ideas about Britain’s imperial past. Those are even more misguided. It’s beyond ironic that the balance of power should be held by the DUP, which descends from Britain’s last major party-splitting political issue, Irish home rule. For reckless and destructive haste, as Pankaj Mishra has observed, the rush to leave the EU resembles Britain’s destructive 10-week scramble to pull out of India and Pakistan in 1947. For self-inflicted international humiliation, Brexit has now surpassed the grandiose miscalculation of the Suez war in 1956. For catastrophically vainglorious leadership, there’s Tony Blair’s neo-imperial intervention in Iraq.

Ultimately Brexit is an event of historic proportions not because it evokes precedents but because it breaks them. At least Lord North wanted to resign but couldn’t. May should have resigned some time ago and didn’t. Jeremy Corbyn is not canny as a Fox. In place of Samuel Johnson we’ve got the performative buffoonery of Boris, and the loudest yelps for independence come from the drivers of neocolonial fantasy.

• Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World is published by William Collins.

‘The petitioning campaign by the Anti-Corn Law League split the Tory party permanently’

Miles Taylor

The Chartists, depicted meeting in church in 1839. Photograph: Alamy

As the number of those signing the petition to revoke Article 50 continues to climb, it is salutary to recall that parliament has ignored the people’s voice in the past. In 1839 the Chartists gathered a staggering 1.28m signatures, calling for parliamentary reform. To no avail. No matter that Erskine May, an authority on such matters, stated in 1844 that “the right of petitioning … is acknowledged as a fundamental right of the constitution”. The House of Commons could always find reasons to veto vox populi. Petitions could not be rude about politicians, they had to be written on parchment, preferably endorsed with an official wax seal, they must not be accompanied by the “tumult” of a large meeting (the Chartists’ first big mistake), and MPs had to vouch for the authenticity of the signatures (the Chartists’ second whopper, their 1848 petition apparently included the signatures of the Queen, the Duke of Wellington and Mr Punch). And yet petitions poured into parliament.

Researchers at Durham University have shown just how many there were down to the 1920s, averaging around 10,000 a year, with signatures running into the millions. Some were crazy, for example, that of the Society for the Suppression of Promiscuous Intercourse. But mostly petitions stopped parliament from doing things the people did not want, such as compulsory Sunday schooling, proposed by Sir Robert Peel’s government in 1843. Anyone – man or woman, voter and non-voter alike – could petition.

We know about the petitioning campaign organised by the Anti-Corn Law League in the 1840s – the Brexit issue of the day that split the Tory party permanently, as free-traders battled with those who wanted to keep up tariffs against imports of foreign grain. But there was an equally fierce petitioning movement calling for the corn laws to remain. Petitions kept politicians on their toes too. In 1852 George Thompson was dumped by his Tower Hamlets voters after he had proved too busy trying to stamp out slavery in the US and hadn’t bothered to present their petition to get rid of the window tax. All this long before TheyWorkForYou.com came along. No wonder the Victorians looked down their noses on referendums and plebiscites, the devices of such despots as Louis Napoleon, who was “elected” emperor of the French by universal male suffrage in 1852. Petitioning was – and remains – the true people’s will at work.

• Miles Taylor’s Empress: Queen Victoria and India is published by Yale.

‘The partition of Ireland led to a bitter civil war and left deep scars’

Diarmaid Ferriter

Border tensions … the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1969. Photograph: Independent News and Media/Getty Images

Exactly 100 years ago, the British prime minister David Lloyd George could not get enough of Europe. As leader of a coalition government his energy was absorbed by the postwar Paris peace conference. George V was none too impressed and complained to him: “Everything gets hung up while you are away … no one seems capable of making any decision.”

That was particularly true in relation to Ireland. In the December 1918 general election Sinn Féin had won 73 of the 105 parliamentary seats allocated to Ireland on the back of a promise to establish an Irish republic and break away from the British empire. The party abstained from Westminster and established its own parliament in Dublin while the Irish Republican Army began a campaign of violence in pursuit of independence. Ulster Unionists, meanwhile, remained trenchantly opposed to any all-Ireland republic and sought reassurances they would remain fully integrated with the UK.

Yet Lloyd George was happy to leave Ireland to others; only one cabinet member, Walter Long, a former leader of Irish unionists, displayed any consistent interest and he began to fashion a plan involving two parliaments for Ireland, north and south, and a Council of Ireland to address shared north-south concerns that would eventually enable Ireland “to work out her own salvation”. Sinn Féin rejected the proposal; Ulster unionists accepted it and the new, unionist-dominated six county statelet of Northern Ireland came into being. It was not a solution the unionists had sought; as the cabinet was told, while Ulster unionists would remain a part of the empire they would not be “on the same footing as citizens of Great Britain”, but “subject to a different regime”. One third of the non-unionist citizens of the new Northern Ireland were ideologically opposed to its very existence.

Having agreed to the partition of Ireland, Lloyd George negotiated with Irish republicans resulting in a compromise treaty – an early 20th century withdrawal agreement – that created an Irish Free State for southern Ireland, a dominion of the empire. It was a compromise that split the Sinn Féin party and the country, and led to a bitter civil war that defined the politics of southern Ireland and left deep scars. Those in favour of the treaty had been faced with selling an unpopular agreement to a divided Irish parliament as the best deal on offer, with the alternative a threatened resumption of war; it was passed by 64 votes to 57. Sinn Féin had been led to believe that a review of the Irish border in the future would lead to the ending of partition – a “backstop” of sorts – which never happened.

Decades later, in 1965, English historian AJP Taylor suggested that with this solution Lloyd George had “conjured” the Irish problem “out of existence”. He had not. The problem had merely been shelved. What is striking is how the same themes have endured; a divided Ireland, a British prime minister so preoccupied with a wider international challenge that the Irish question is underestimated, the scrambling for a temporary solution to the Irish dilemma, Sinn Féin refusing to sit in Westminster, Ulster unionists with undue influence on government policy but still distrustful of what compromise might mean to their status within the UK.

Senior Conservative Austen Chamberlain articulated the simple political priority in 1924: to prevent Ireland being “a fatal influence on British politics”. Throughout the decades, British prime ministers remained determined to avoid, in the memorable advice given to former Prime Minister James Callaghan, “getting sucked into the Irish Bog”.

Clearly, that strategy did not work. It was accompanied by a wilful ignorance about Ireland which, from the late 1960s, led to the British government struggling to contain the Irish Troubles and much later, after the peace process, deciding that because Ireland was relatively peaceful, it was not a complicating factor in the context of Brexit. The Irish border question was woefully neglected during the referendum campaign. That carelessness has resulted in a new, ugly chapter in a long story of fragile Anglo-Irish relations and the political conjurers of today are struggling to find a suitable trick.

• Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics is published by Profile.

‘A century on from the Weimar republic, minority groups are still targeted’

Maryyum Mehmood

Manifesto of hate … a vigil for the victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Images

“I used to believe that, first and foremost, I was a German … All that has changed over the past five years … Whether we wanted to or not, we were forced to reflect upon our Jewishness.” These were the words of Georg Hermann, a popular novelist writing in 1919 Berlin. Hermann’s remarks resonated with many Jews of the Weimar republic who faced the rise of antisemitism in the aftermath of the first world war. A century later, we see the same self-questioning emerge in Britain among many minority groups – Muslims in particular.

Worldwide, the increasing vilification of Muslims is commonplace, unchallenged and normalised. Sometimes it remains latent, but during times of uncertainty it rears its head. With the global recession and austerity hitting those most vulnerable, there are striking parallels with the period immediately following the Great Depression of 1929. At times such as these, when people begin questioning the fabric of their society, minority groups are scapegoated. Following the global “war on terror” this phenomenon is exacerbated by media narratives that perpetuate racialised tropes about Muslims.

Today, Muslims are scrutinised for their everyday practices; their choice of attire is banned, their beliefs and ideologies are misconstrued, individuals are attacked and their places of worship desecrated. Similar negative stereotyping and scaremongering tactics were employed to intellectualise, and thereby normalise, the stigmatisation and abuse of Weimar Jews. The idea of Jewish identity as an existential threat to “Germanness” led to fervent policing and later the internment and state-led extermination of Jews.

This is not to say that Muslims are Europe’s “new Jews”. This would belittle the historical contingencies of the past, and disregard the uniqueness of historical antisemitism and contemporary Islamophobia respectively. It would also suggest that present-day antisemitism has been defeated – it has not. Yet there is a significant overlap in the experiences that both groups endure. Furthermore, with the global rise of populism, targeting minority groups has become mainstream. One need only look towards the manifesto of the New Zealand mosque shooter, which spewed hate against almost all minorities, yet lambasted Muslims as the most severe of threats.

History teaches us that prejudice must never go unchallenged. My own research, exploring the responses to antisemitism and Islamophobia, shows that one of the best ways to dismantle hate-filled rhetoric is to demystify the negative stereotypes on which bigotry thrives. In the battle against prejudice the key is to unify, not be selective in our approach, and never to lose hope.

• Maryyum Mehmood is a research associate at Oxford University.

‘An American fascism would fetishise the flag. It might even sport a baseball cap’

Sarah Churchwell

Ultra-nationalist … four Ku Klux Klan Members c1922. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty Images

In his 2004 study The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton suggests that the original Ku Klux Klan, which arose in the American south in the 1870s, has a strong claim to be the world’s first fascist movement, one that could reasonably be seen as an indigenously American political form. All fascisms are indigenous by definition, because they are ultra-nationalist: an American fascism would fetishise the American flag, not the Nazi one. Who knows, it might even sport a baseball cap.

The second Klan, which came to its ascendancy in the early to mid 1920s, just as Benito Mussolini was coming to power in Italy, was widely recognised in the US as a specifically “fascist” organisation. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, it went into decline, plagued by corruption and sex scandals. But its members did not stop believing that they needed to make America great again by purifying it of citizens they viewed as lesser or “alien”; they simply formed new groups, with different names. In 1930, the “American Fascisti” was founded in Atlanta by a former KKK member; in 1932, a group known as the Khaki Shirts was formed, declaring its intention to overthrow Herbert Hoover. “Comparisons with the Fascisti of Italy and the Nazi of Germany” were “inevitable”, its founder noted, but promised the Khaki Shirts “would be essentially American”. The “Silver Legion of America,” known as the Silver Shirts, followed in January 1933; Hitler took power in Germany two months later. That year a report was published on “home grown” American fascism, counting “some 103 separate fascist organisations in the United States”.

One of the more famous responses at the time was by Sinclair Lewis, in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Having spent seven years listening to his wife, the journalist and anti-fascist crusader Dorothy Thompson, discuss the rise of European fascism, Lewis predicted in his novel what an American fascism might look like. It would be defined by capitalism – in Lewis’s prophetic words, “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits”.

Within a few months Thompson launched a journalistic broadside against what she called “the lunatic fringe”, noting how many of these groups invoked Christianity in their names. These reactionary groups had joined forces under the banner of “the Union Party” (just as their political heirs would 80 years later in Charlottesville, when white supremacists rallied to “Unite the Right”). Some conservatives, she warned, would make cynical alliances with fascism rather than tolerate liberalism. Whether such a group could consolidate power, in her judgment, would depend on whether “men who call themselves conservatives” began helping far-right groups in order to defeat liberals.

This idea made her remember, Thompson said, something that Huey Long had told her: “American fascism would never emerge as a fascist but [only] as a 100% American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right president and cabinet.” Moreover, Long added, “it would be quite unnecessary to suppress the press. A couple of powerful news-paper chains and two or three papers with practical monopolies of certain fields would go out to smear, calumniate and blackmail opponents into silence, and ruthlessly to eliminate competitors.” All it would take was one powerful news organisation to support it.

• Sarah Churchwell’s Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream is published by Bloomsbury.

‘Dunkirk was not a story of gritty heroism but a colossal defeat’

Richard Overy

Many Brexiters inhabit this strange legend-land when British democracy stood firm against authoritarian Europe … Dunkirk. Photograph: Underwood Archives/Getty Images

It was perhaps no coincidence that shortly after the referendum vote in 2016 the film Dunkirk became a hit in British cinemas. This was a story that resonated with the Brexiters – leaving behind both the unreliable French and the aggressive Germans, Britain alone at last. Then two years later came another hit, Darkest Hour, with Winston Churchill the hero rallying the country to stand alone against the menace of a German-dominated Europe. Coincidences perhaps, but the spirit of Dunkirk and Churchillian defiance has been implicitly (and explicitly) invoked as a metaphor for Britain’s abandonment of Europe in 2019 and for the stubborn defiance of the more extreme Brexiters in the face of an impending calamity: no deal with Europe echoes no deal with Hitler. Too many of those who want to leave Europe inhabit this strange legend-land of 1940, when British democracy stood firm against authoritarian Europe.

In truth the history was very different. First Neville Chamberlain in September 1939, then Churchill in June 1940, chose war and its continuation in order to save Europe from Hitler and to restore a democratic continent. These politicians were Europeans in a very real sense, otherwise they would have chosen, as some historians think they should have, the easy route of accommodation with Germany and Italy, in order to fall back on the empire and a global role distinct from the rest of Europe. Churchill used the rhetoric of Britain facing the Nazi threat alone but he wanted a restored Europe. After the end of the war he was a great champion of some kind of European unity. The Council of Europe established in 1949, a predecessor to the institutions of a united Europe, was an initiative that Churchill helped to create, indeed he originated the term in 1943. The summer months of 1940 might have been a British moment of defiant solitude in the face of near defeat, but British war aims, to the extent that they were ever articulated clearly, were to save Britain as a beacon of liberty and then to restore that liberty to Europe.

This is a history easily masked by the emphasis on the Dunkirk spirit, or very soon, if the calamity of “no deal” happens, a renewed blitz spirit. All of which is pointless rhetoric. Being “alone” was of no help in 1940. There was no way that Britain and the empire unaided could have unseated Hitler’s domination of Europe. That could only be achieved later thanks to the American and Soviet war efforts. Dunkirk was not a story of gritty heroism, though there were gritty heroes, but a colossal defeat. The Battle of Britain and the blitz were survived, but Britain emerged in 1941 battered and bruised, undefeated for the moment but unable to find the means to defeat the Axis enemy. Using the crisis of 1940 as a historical reference point for Brexit has this right: there are no solutions, it seems, for a painless withdrawal from Europe. And afterwards? No blitz, but plenty of damage, this time self-inflicted. Much better the image of 1945 when Britain played its part in restoring the liberty of western Europe, paved the way for the end of empire, and finally began to abandon pretensions to world power.

• Richard Overy’s The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality is published by Penguin.

‘The puzzle is why the forces of nationalism failed to achieve traction in the 1975 Europe referendum’

David Kynaston

Changing nation … Thatcherism sowed the seeds of Euroscepticism. Photograph: PA

In immediate postwar Britain, the class structure was hierarchical and fixed; jobs were usually for life; most people lived out those lives in narrowly confined geographies; levels of trust were such that motorcycles did not have locks until 1957. And, amid largely stable party loyalties, the general assumption was that politicians were not, by and large, out for themselves. France in the mid-1950s had its populist “Poujadist” moment (starting as a revolt by small shopkeepers against taxes), but there was barely an echo here.

Predictably, the much-mythologised 1960s sowed the seeds of what was to come in the long term. The pace of change, disturbing to many, sharply picked up (loss of empire, start of de-industrialisation, more women working, mass immigration, destruction of familiar urban environment, social liberalism, youth culture, rise of higher education). Politics became professionalised and thus more detached, and the coming of satire (Beyond the Fringe, That Was the Week That Was, perhaps above all Private Eye) began a process that in time, for all its necessary calling out of crimes and misdemeanours, helped to create a corrosively cynical and jaded attitude to politics as the default position for most people. If there was a straw in the wind, it was undoubtedly the London dockers who in April 1968 marched in favour of Enoch Powell after his “rivers of blood” speech.

What about the 1970s? The dominant image we have is of industrial unrest, states of emergency and general chaos – an image with a kernel of truth, but grossly exaggerated. In retrospect, the great puzzle is why the forces of backward-looking nationalism failed to achieve any significant traction in the 1975 referendum on Europe. The short answer has to be that “Europe” had yet to become the neuralgically symbolic issue, the focus for a whole nexus of discontents and grievances that was only in part about Europe itself.

By the 1990s, following a decade of Thatcherism, this was starting to change. De-industrialisation, job insecurity, immigration, destruction of community – all these and other trends had gone much further. And, presided over by Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun, a new, toxic popular culture had emerged that was xenophobic, glorified nationalism, and in its crude materialism and systematic resort to stereotypes implicitly or explicitly trashed the intrinsic value of education. Put another way, the raw materials of populism had gathered; and from Maastricht on, it was not too difficult to guess what their cause might one day be.

• David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, written with Francis Green, is published by Bloomsbury.

‘All media has caused alarm, but the internet has allowed populists to cut out the middleman’

Jan-Werner Mueller

America first … Donald Trump at a 2016 presidential campaign rally. Photograph: Matt York/AP

Every modern media revolution has been greeted with dire predictions that new technologies would empower authoritarians and corrupt the people. Yet the fact that previous deaths of democracy by technology have been greatly exaggerated should not comfort us. There is reason to believe that this time might be different: social media are more helpful for authoritarian populists than cheap newspapers, radio and TV ever were.

There was no golden age for media and democracy, but historians would agree that newspapers played a part in democratisation – mainly because a free, highly competitive press also financed and printed the muckrakers who exposed corruption and other political scandals and thus furthered the cause of progressive reforms. Less obviously, a mass press helped to create mass publics with shared considered judgments – a precondition for holding politicians accountable at election time.

Radio and TV would have seemed to help this democratic function further. Except that already in the mid-1960s, when the big US broadcasting networks dominated the airwaves with well-researched news and moderate opinions, the media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore proclaimed that “the public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished.” Historians would today perhaps say the opposite.

Here is the difference in our day: populism has been hugely helped by a more general crisis of intermediary institutions, political parties and professional media in particular. Populists have always claimed that they are the only authentic representatives of the people (since all other politicians are corrupt) and that only they understand the authentic popular will. They have also always distrusted any intermediaries between themselves and “the people”; in their eyes, to mediate means to distort. The internet has allowed them for the first time to make good on the promise of comprehensively cutting out the middleman, and to offer what the Italian political theorist Nadia Urbinati, with a paradoxical-sounding formulation, has called “direct representation”. Historically, the sense of an unmediated connection is not completely novel: one may have felt it in a crowd at a party conference, for instance. But that would have been an extraordinary experience; now, it is available day and night at the touch of a screen.

Intermediary institutions introduce a degree of pluralism into politics: professional media will usually present a range of voices; parties, despite obviously being partisan, will have some internal democracy, such that one has to contend with different views. Populists are anti-pluralists – only they represent the people, and citizens who don’t support them are declared by them as “un-American” or “un-British”. Hence the fact that the latest media revolution allows one to shut out all other voices is likely to make political life a lot easier for populists.

• Jan-Werner Mueller’s What Is Populism? is published by Penguin.

• This article was amended on 1 April 2019. The UK’s first Europe referendum took place in 1975 not 1974.