We should thank Brexiters.

My generation is scapegoating stupidity for having failed at its civic duties.

Days after the announcement of the EU referendum results, the comments on my Twitter and Facebook feeds keep moving along the same line:

It’s not just Brits who are reacting in this embittered way. My international friends are displaying a similar contempt for the old, uneducated crew that chose to sever the ties with the EU. The general feeling is well summarised by some high profile statements from two of my fellow countrymen. The mayor of the Italian city of Bergamo and communication adviser to the prime minister Matteo Renzi, Giorgio Gori, remarked that “an uniformed electorate produces epochal disasters”, asking himself “should the ignorant be allowed to vote?”; while the acclaimed author of “Gomorra” Roberto Saviano launched an indictment of “the People” as such, guilty in the past of supporting Hitler and Mussolini, declarations of war, the persecution of antifascists Europeanists.

Such hatred for the stupid, ignorant Brexiters matches the hatred of the Brexiters for the immigrants but, unlike the second, seems to be perfectly socially acceptable.

Now, I fully share the frustration of those who feel they’ve been dragged out of a project in which they have massive stakes, by a generation that needs to google “what is the EU” the day after the vote.

I am a 27 years old Italian journalist based in London, I have done my Erasmus in Paris and my girlfriend is Spanish: my whole life has been shaped by the free movement granted by the EU (and by low-cost airlines). Also, I probably wouldn’t have needed to leave my country to work, had it not been for an uneducated electorate that gifted most of my adult life with one Berlusconi government after another.

But the reaction unleashed among my peers by the Leave vote goes far beyond the normal post-election resentment of the losers. This can’t be explained solely by the issue at stake: when the Greeks turned their back on Europe last year, in the most quickly overturned referendum in history, not much Europeanism was to be seen around the Internet.

What made the difference here was the nature of the referendum campaign. For two decades, the values put forward by young Remainers have been progressively canonized as hip and cool and smart by the media, the political and the economical establishment along: cosmopolitanism, flexibility, openness, the empowering enjoyment of cheap fashion, cheap flights, cheap taxi rides, against the grey sedentary lives lived by our parents in their non-diverse communities.

But for most people even of my age — many of them are the immigrants for whose rights Remainers have vehemently campaigned — leaving a deprived suburb at the periphery of the EU or the UK to open a start-up in Shoreditch or a tapas bar in Berlin has never been an option. The very possibility to find a good job in unemployment-free London probably prevented many young Europeans to act politically on their concerns for the deteriorating conditions of their home countries.

While the economically privileged enjoyed the OGM-free carrots of the EU project in all its aseptic glory, since the financial crisis the poor have only been shown the austerity stick, in the suburbs of London as in Athens, in Naples as in Molenbeek. In this world the old-fashioned attachment to national borders, religious bigotry, racism, never went away.

The university educated youth seems to have removed from its subconscious the very existence of these ideas, as a backward nightmare to be forgotten by the means of an enthusiastic political correctness. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out, political correctness is “a form of self-discipline” that creates the illusion of a conflictless society while in fact perpetuating the conditions for marginalisation and racism, and hindering genuine intercultural communication.

After the last general election, two Labour MPs wrote that working class voters viewed the party activists “like middle-class Ryanair passengers having to stomach a couple of hours’ flight with people they shared little in common with”. The lack of mutual understanding between these two demographics could also explain the confidence of many EU supporters on the day of the vote: they might have mistaken the amount of Remain stickers worn by people in central London for an effective electoral campaign.

My whole argument is egregiously summarized by one tweet:

Grown up in this comfort bubble, abiding to the values sanctioned and promoted by the establishment, millennials were not in a position to really understand what Brexit was about, politically. I have myself spent the last two days in a condition of bemused astonishment.

That’s why Brexit came to us as an unexpected, undeserved, tragic and irrational FUCK OFF from the uneducated bigot to the well-educated liberal, that suddenly discover themselves a minority. Blaming it on stupidity was the predictable reaction, as the only exemption allowed by political correctness to refer to the demographics of the Brexiters. The same happens with Donald Trump supporters in the United States.

A brilliant feature published on The Atlantic argues that a war is being waged against stupid people:

People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The attractive feature of the stupidity argument is that it makes you automatically intelligent by the virtue of using it. That is ironic, if you consider that many Remainers have chosen to voice their discontent with an online petition asking for retroactive rules tailor-made to invalidate the results of the referendum, something that shows a remarkable ignorance of basic constitutional principles.

The stupid/smart chasm was probably even more fundamental than the generational one in the referendum campaign, as we have all seen the pro-EU smart grannies enjoying their British pensions on the beaches of Alicante.

But the problem with what we call stupidity, as The Atlantic article shows, is that it is closely correlated to poverty: low IQ levels, poor school performances, early education dropout are all features of economically depressed areas. Higher mortality rates also affect “stupid people”.

The Brexiters may well have voted out of bigotry, alimented by right wing politicians who know that economic chaos and a good scapegoat allow to scrape rights to otherwise unthinkable rates. But when a society that calls itself democratic doesn’t provide half of its members with the economic and cultural instruments that shield from demagogy, that is a failed society. We usually clean our consciousness thinking of stupidity as a sort of natural fact, but to a great extent it is a social product. And in the political discourse, it often works as a comprehensive label for all the left-behinds.

In the past mankind have idolized undefeatable warriors, skilful rhetoricians and saints. For a society that worships nerds (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheldon Cooper…), the idiots are the perfect scapegoat for all its failures. As for my generation, blaming stupidity allows to portrait ourselves as victims: so we can avoid to feel guilty for being so keen on enjoying the bright side of Europe and not being bothered enough to do something about the downside. We can tell the story of smart generation oppressed by dull gerontocracy, and ignore that only 36% of the 18–24 age group turned out at polls, against the 83% of the over 65.

Yes: the EU generation deserted the most momentous decision of their lives. Millennials failed at their basic civic duties just as much as anyone else, but won’t take responsibility for it.

The fact that outright fascists comments, such as the tweet of American neoliberal Josh Barro, resonate with the views of the liberal youth should ring more then a bell.

Since democracy has never been so unpopular among my generation, a conclusive reminder of why we govern ourselves with such an imperfect system is probably appropriate. With time, the governing elite of any society grows out of touch with the rest of the people. It ends up thinking of its own goals and ambitions as the only possible goals and ambitions of society as a whole. Elections work as a safety valve through which the citizens can let the rulers know that what they’re doing is not working anymore.

If we came to the point where half of the UK citizens took such a traumatic step as Brexit, it is probably because the safety valve had not been working for a long time: in recent years, no remark was more frequently heard then “elections change nothing”. In pre-democratic times, the result of pressure from below not finding a way out was violent revolutions, kings’ beheadings and wars.

We should consider ourselves lucky that we will only have to deal with Brexit: let’s see it a harsh wake-up call. The freedoms of the EU are worth nothing if half of the population of its member states is left in cultural and economic deprivation. The very policies needed to recuperate these people into the body social have been hindered by the EU since the financial crisis.

This is a momentum for bold proposals: if we think we can go back to business as usual, putting our hopes in the Government not implementing the result of the Referendum, complaining about the idiocy of the populace, the next wake-up call will not be as soft.