Brexit, Trump, & the Normalization of Bigotry

When Does a Hate Campaign Cease to be a Hate Campaign? Apparently: When it Wins

“Leave” victory in last week’s United Kingdom referendum has resulted in a number of things: a plunge in the value of the British currency and worldwide markets; regret on the part of many British voters; and almost immediate refutation of the promises offered by “Leave” leadership on what benefits departing the European Union would bring.

One of the more surprising outcomes has been the media’s revision of Leave voters from xenophobes (and those xenophobic enough to be untroubled by them) to defiant populist warriors battling globalization and the politics of austerity. It’s as if, by achieving a majority, the Leave campaign has been vindicated in a moral sense, rather than simply an electoral one. After all, the UK, a wealthy and modern nation, can’t possibly have that many people willing to indulge in or reconcile themselves to bigotry.

The retroactive exoneration of the Leave campaign runs counter to most everything about it — its politics, its personnel, and its promises — but before addressing those, it’s important confront what this interpretation captures that has always been, and remains, valid.

The EU functions on a democratic principle, but because the decisions of the European Parliament and other EU bodies necessarily impinge upon the sovereignty of nation-states, the many people who prefer to set significant policy exclusively in the context of their own country look upon the EU with hostility and suspicion. It was this very reluctance to cede too much of its own decision-making power that led the UK to reject the common currency of the Euro and the budget parameters which accompany it, most especially the restrictions on acceptable levels of debt.

Nevertheless, this did not spare the UK from other consequences — good and bad — of EU membership. Access to the common market was contingent upon accepting the free movement of labor, as well as a host of regulations regarding the environment, public safety, and workers rights. This might well have been acceptable the people in the UK as the EU groped its way through adolescence, but as it matured and expanded its membership rapidly, the legitimacy of the original premise was compromised.

When EU bureaucracies grew in number and significance, the power of any one country’s delegation in its Parliament was diluted. Decisions made in Brussels wrought dramatic changes at home, yet the levers or ability to influence those decisions sat at considerable remove from ordinary people, even as they cast their ballots for EU representatives in good faith.

This crisis of democratic accountability became more acute when member-states were admitted without regard to their social policy offerings and tolerated even if when they did not share in the enunciated common values of EU. The election and demoralizing record of governance of the right-wing authoritarian regime in Poland, for example, added to an already robust exodus of Poles searching for a better life within safer corners of the EU. Poland’s minimum wage is less than half of what is on offer in the UK; there has been high unemployment since 2008. Given this range of incentives, it is not surprising that young people have left the country in droves. As Vox points out, Poland ranks behind India as the second largest source of immigrants to the UK.

A political equilibrium based on common values and participation is jeopardized when its contradictions become more consequential, and when a clique of technocrats rather than the collective will is delegated to redressing them. “Where is [the EU] going?” one Brexit voter wondered. “It failed to make itself clear, simple and accountable. It just rumbles on.” Nowhere was this more apparent than in the EU’s handling of the Greek crisis, which inflicted painful austerity measures on the Greek people against their will, and against the better judgment of many economists.

Not surprisingly, “sovereignty” ranked first among the rationales cited by Leave voters. Though the term can have numerous sinister connotations, in light of the EU’s own deficiencies, it is possible that thousands of Leave voters are innocent of all of them.

So What?

Nevertheless, in linking their fortunes to what was fundamentally a hate campaign, Leave voters motivated by a democratic impulse do more than negate any positive purpose to their intervention; they stand implicated in its worst intent. They remind me of the Trump supporters who express their candidate preference as despair over political gridlock, and couch their willingness to ignore the racism as a form of tolerance. “I’ll turn my cheek to the David Duke comments,” one Trump supporter — a registered Democrat — told The New York Times.

In the UK, Leave voters resent being linked to UKIP and others. “I didn’t like the way Remain were continuously trying to imply that anyone who didn’t agree with them must fit the media’s narrative that a leave voter is a rightwing bigot,” one Leave voter complained to The Guardian. Since the referendum, a chorus of voices, including some in the United States, have warned commentators from concluding that the result was produced by a racist majority. That may well be true. It is, however, beside the point: the result empowered racism regardless. Racism is not simply a perspective held by people, or a subject. It is a virulent ideology that harms people; it has objects.

The belief that you can itemize your views on what is, in essence, a hate campaign — that is, to decouple its bigotry from all other messages — is itself a form privilege: an exemption from, and indifference to, the fate of those most endangered by its hatred. If not motivated by racial animus, these voters are guilty of a kind of second-order bigotry, a “turning of the cheek” to an intolerance that threatens the lives and well-being of their fellow citizens, including those who harbor many of their same concerns regarding the EU.

This harsh verdict is the only conceivable one in light of the particular politics of Brexit (and Donald Trump). Efforts to portray the vote as a rejection of austerity are particularly confounded and confused: by virtue of the exemption from the Euro, the UK has not been subjected to any monetary policy or rule-making from Brussels. However, the Tory Conservative Party — whose members joined with UKIP to provide the impetus for and leadership behind the Leave Campaign — is, in fact, responsible for austerity. To think that voters acted out of an urge to expel austerity politics by supporting its principal advocates is to impute to them an unnamed and nonsensical motivation, something that is — contrary to professed ideologies — elitist in the extreme.

Depicting the Brexit vote along these lines is not just unacceptable; it is simply not credible. Overall turnout for the referendum ran high. But according to the calculations of Ben Pritchett (discussed here; and confirmed by The Telegraph), turnout among the working class was only 52 percent. In contrast, for other occupational groups, turnout was extremely high and the vote was split. This means that in absolute numbers, “a far higher number of middle- and upper-class voters (around 10 million voters) actually voted to leave the EU than the working class).”

Instead of a rejection of globalization, Leave voters from a variety of backgrounds who were concerned about sovereignty (in whatever of its many permutations) and immigration drove the result. They showed no compunction in joining their fate with those who had more dangerous ambitions.

For the hardcore Leave campaign, this kind of malevolent hatred has been apparent from the start. One of Britain First’s leaders announced his intention to run for mayor of London with a vow to take on “pro-EU, Islamist-loving opponents.” Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of Britain First, greeted this news with a searing testimony. “They think they can get away with ruining our country, turning us into a Third World country, giving away our homes, jobs and heritage,” she said, and then proceeded to threaten retribution for what she looks upon as treason, and most others see as an imperfect political arrangement. “We will not rest until every traitor is punished for their crimes against our country. And by punished, I mean good old fashioned British justice at the end of a rope!” In court, the assassin of Labour MP Jo Cox gave his name as “Death to traitors, Freedom for Britain.”

Repugnance like this was not confined to a political fringe. A week before the Brexit vote, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) unveiled a Leave billboard that pictured a long line of refugees seeking entrance to a country (as it turns out, to Slovenia) with the slogan “Breaking Point: the EU Has Failed Us All.” When it was pointed out that the visual depicting non-white, huddled masses resembled a piece of Nazi propaganda, Boris Johnson, former Tory mayor of London, disavowed UKIP, and subsequently tried to salvage his reputation by suggesting that “Leave” is the only way to disarm anti-immigrant feeling, a paradox he hoped to make convincing by proclaiming a devotion to a diversity that has, in fact, been the principal target of many Brexiters.

When Class Narratives Erase Race, You’re Doing it Wrong

The very real economic anxieties that have always underwritten right-wing populist movements do not, in of themselves, alter or exonerate the dynamics of the campaign. When it comes to working class Trump supporters or Brexiters, it is totally unnecessary for any person to make the claim that race or ethnicity motivates them more than class. They make that case all by themselves, by virtue of their political affiliation. By embedding their intervention in conservative politics, they strengthen the forces seek to undermine the welfare of working class people.

The real failure is to provide a viable and persuasive political option to the many working class people who abstain from voting; it is turnout, not the Brexit result or degree of Trump support, that most indicts progressive politics.

To suggest otherwise, as the media have done by whitewashing the forces driving these electoral coalitions, is to erase the many working class (and other) people of color who have rejected both Trump and Brexit in overwhelming numbers. As Jamelle Bouie points out, the working class in the United States is “blacker and browner than it used to be;” in ten years time, people of color “will constitute nearly half of all working class Americans.” He recently reminded readers of the tendency to overlook working class people of color when he registered his thoughts on the Brexit vote as the result of “embattled whiteness.” To those marginalized by these politics, the question of whether all Brexit voters were motivated by “white fragility” amounts to a distinction without a difference. They validated and empowered those forces all the same.

Recently complaints have surfaced about the BBC’s coverage of Boris Johnson’s stewardship of the Leave campaign similar to those heard in the United States regarding Trump: a platform extended to lies, without necessary context or critique, offered under some superficial guise of “neutrality.” A UK resident who tweets under the handle “@KojoRTE” excoriated BBC news for featuring a post-Brexit interview with “Lee,” a fascist from Leeds, when the reporter allowed him to say that stopping immigration “was not racism.” KojoRTE pointed out that broadcasting these words without challenging them bolsters an ideology of hate. He subsequently learned and shared on social media that “Lee” was Lee Parkinson, an officer in the local Leeds fascist party, which promises in its literature to put the “Great Back into Great Britain.”

Naturally, only a minority of Leave voters’ views align with those of “white loyalist” Lee Parksinson. Yet many of them share fundamental points of agreement with him, and still others who do not cast their lot in with him anyway, disgusted by a stagnant political status quo. These are roughly the same dynamics that led frustrated Weimar Republic voters, many of whom claimed to repudiate Hitler’s racism, to throw their support behind him nevertheless. History has not been kind to the subsequent efforts of journalists, both in the US and elsewhere, to depict that vote as driven by economics with only a a small faction dedicated to the politics of racism.