Brexit Britain and the problem of democratic fundamentalism

London, Week 3. Post-referendum Britain is a strange place, a kind of real-life 28 Days Later as narrated by Samuel Pepys. Hate crime has spiked, the economy is circling the drain. British racists are victorious and exultant; neo-fascists across Europe are inspired, but the mundanities and inanities of life go on regardless. Political corpses pile up in the streets; the commentariat spills ink by the bucket trying to make sense of what the hell happens next; and the 17 million people who conspired to drive the country onto these rocks are everywhere absolved.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, actor and activist Jesse Williams gives an extraordinary speech about racism and complicity, during which he issues a simple, eloquent and profound statement: “The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander.” Amid the torrent of hate unleashed by the Brexit vote, it’s probable we’ll soon have to revisit more of this speech, and others like it, as we’re forced to confront our own endemic race problem. Or maybe we’ll continue in our complacency, ignoring and enabling the politics of hate at every turn while insisting on the legitimacy of doing so: my vote, my right, my business.

As we wander dazed among Brexit’s rubble and wonder if something — a new alliance, perhaps, or a spirit of unity and cooperation — can be salvaged from the ruins of progressive Britain, focusing on the relationship between brutality and bystander can help us not to lose sight of certain truths: that whatever else it may have been the victory for Leave was also a triumph for a vicious race-hate campaign over the principles of inclusion and pluralism; that it both constituted and precipitated an act of collective violence against the most marginalized in our society (and yes, that holds true even though a significant minority of Leave voters themselves came from marginalized or downtrodden communities); but, perhaps most distressingly of all, that the vote was sufficiently close that had all self-identified progressives and anti-racists united behind a Remain vote to reject the politics and discourse of hate, the ugly spectacle of racism legitimized and vindicated would have been comfortably averted.

All of which brings us back to the bystanders. Over the last month, far too many residents of Britain have been brutalized. On 23 June, there were, quite simply, far too many bystanders. A mere 35% of eligible voters actively rejected the storm of hate whipped up by the Leave campaign. While hate triumphed, the remaining 65% either helped it on its way or stood by and did nothing to stop it. Among the ranks of the bystanders we can count both abstainers and (charitably) those who voted Leave despite claiming to abhor the campaign’s racism.

And yet the comforting of bystanders remains a staple of post-referendum discourse: the token disclaimer paragraph in every comment piece reassures any Leave voters who might be reading that they’re the good kind, in no way connected to the bad — a vanishingly small minority of actual bigots and racists who always seem to exist somewhere else, and whose existence is acknowledged only reluctantly and in the most abstract terms.

It’s easy, in fact, to get the impression that this brave new world — in which community centres are daubed with racist graffiti, people on their way to work and school are subject to vile abuse, and Marine Le Pen rhapsodizes about the beauty of it all — happened without anyone voting for it. The electorate may have backed a racist campaign with racist beneficiaries, but they did not vote for racism. They voted for racism’s uncannily lookalike cousin Legitimate Concerns, they voted to give “the establishment” a poke in the eye, they voted on matters of esoteric principle. They are emphatically not to blame for any of this.

This narrative of blamelessness requires shifting all responsibility away from voters and onto politicians, in ways that don’t always turn out to be particularly complimentary to the former. Politicians reason and calculate for their own malign ends; voters are led by the nose, naïve and trusting. This gives the average voter at once far too much credit (for nobility of intention) and far too little (for reasoning capacity). When a mainstream politician seizes triumphantly on the latest abominable utterance by a UKIP candidate by saying something like “the public will be appalled at this view, which is, frankly, bordering on racist,” the misplaced faith in the voter attains an almost touching level of naivety. The fundamental point that such statements miss — whether sincerely or disingenuously — is that, for a significant minority of voters, overt racism (not “borderline racism” or “dog-whistle racism” or any other euphemistically modified construction) is a key part of the selling pitch.

This has never been truer than in the EU referendum, where four-fifths of Leave voters believed migration and/or multiculturalism to be forces for ill, and voted accordingly. Factor in a similar proportion who believed “social liberalism” also to be a malign force, and three-quarters opposed to feminism and environmentalism, and the picture emerges of a section of the electorate determined to preserve white, male, heterosexual privilege at all costs. The majority of Leave voters woke on 24 June in a country that embodied their own hostilities and prejudices, and if the remainder failed to foresee that a victory for Vote Leave’s toxic campaign would allow it to shape the post-referendum ideological landscape, it certainly wasn’t for lack of warning.

No doubt the urge to hold the electorate blameless for the referendum result and its consequences has in part shaped the narrative of who voted Leave and why. Notwithstanding the fact that a majority of Leave voters were from the middle and upper classes, the referendum result has been widely interpreted as a howl of rage against a failing system by a disenfranchised white working class, and progressives are nervous that second-guessing the intentions of this body might signify elitism, which must be avoided at all costs. Yet there’s little that’s more elitist than the absurdly condescending depiction of an entire economic underclass as a homogeneous, unreasoning body animated solely by rage, incapable of parsing an argument logically, or foreseeing the immediate consequences of its actions, or bearing any degree of moral responsibility for the outcome.

Condescending it may be, but the narrative persists nonetheless: politicians are racist, divisive, cunning; voters are well-intentioned, benevolent, stupid. The voter fulfils the role of virtuous moron, useful idiot, noble savage; the act of voting itself becomes a kind of sacramental cleansing rite, purging us of our innate prejudices. The mere act of entering the polling station purifies every tainted citizen, preparing them for the moment in which they’ll weigh the submissions of our ignoble political class like a dumb, gullible parody of blind Justitia.

Here’s the not-so-hidden problem with this narrative: it’s garbage. It’s patronizing and infantilizing. And it’s a destructive fiction that serves only neoliberal interests and actively undermines social cohesion. Into the very fabric of our democracy, it weaves selfishness and the cult of the individual at the expense of community and collectivity. It results in calamities like the one we’re now suffering through. And as long as we do nothing to arrest its spread, we risk repeating the follies of Brexit in ways yet unimagined.

There is, however, an opportunity to rethink these assumptions. In the aftermath of this referendum more than of any other vote I can think of, there’s a palpable cognitive dissonance between the fiction of the blameless voter and the bald facts of lived experience — whether of open conflict in families riven by recriminations and accusations of betrayal, or of citizens nervously scanning results maps and wondering if they dare venture outside for fear of choking on a toxic smog of hate. Instinctively we cling to resentment and recrimination because we sense that, as painful as these divisive sentiments are, they offer a glimmer of hope for something better.

Let me be the first to admit that, while it may offer a few crumbs of catharsis or vindication, there’s little value simply in pointing an accusing finger at friends and family who voted Leave, and solemnly intoning “You did this.” But it is important to use this opportunity to reflect on voter power and accountability, and on the possibilities and limitations of ballot-box democracy. If a cross-party progressive alliance is indeed to rise from the ashes of Brexit, a key element in its success will be our willingness to recalibrate our understanding of democracy and its possibilities to be at once more realistic and more constructive.

The first step in doing so is to dissociate the exercise of democracy from the neoliberal mantra of Choice. If, as Karl Marx suggested, religion was the opiate of the nineteenth-century masses, the twenty-first-century mass opiate is the insidious notion of Choice. A monstrous hybrid of the founding tenets of liberalism, democracy, and free-market capitalism, Choice promises virtually unlimited freedoms so long as none of the options matter or differ materially from one another. Choose from any one of thirty washing machines with identical functions and specifications, fill it with one of ten distinctly branded and ostensibly competing detergents, all manufactured in the same factory by the same company. So much power, coos Choice, with neither responsibility nor consequence for anyone but yourself.

Democracy in the UK — or more specifically its exercise in the casting of ballots — is and is not Choice. Certainly the options on offer are often radically limited, restricted by a centre-right political consensus, by vested interests with sophisticated lobbying machinery that gives them direct access to the corridors of power, and — usually, though not of course in the EU referendum — by our First-Past-The-Post electoral system. (This is not to suggest that mechanisms don’t exist to expand the field of options through direct engagement and community action, or through debate and dialogue. Effecting change by such means is certainly challenging, but by no means impossible.) But voting is also the single most direct means by which the majority of people exert real power — with real consequences — upon their fellow citizens.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the political right has always conflated democracy and Choice, as twin articles of quasi-religious faith in the consumerist cult of individualism. For rightwing political discourse, democracy fulfils the same functions as religion in almost every respect: as an article of faith to be worshipped unquestioningly, as a stick with which to beat others and a pretext for invading and conquering nation states, but also as a harmlessly deified, ossified commodity whose underlying ethics and potential for meaningful social change are rendered safely impotent.

For much of the last two decades, the left (or at least the centre-left) has countered with a secular, pragmatic view of democracy epitomized by tactical voting campaigns and vote-swapping websites. Thanks to such campaigns, the idea that voting for the least-bad option constituted a kind of murky ideological fudge was gradually dispelled, and maximizing the real-world impact of one’s vote at the expense of one’s own ideological purity came rightly to be regarded as not only worthwhile but empowering.

But a glance at social media today — and indeed at the campaign messages of parties on the left — suggests that this welcome development has not only been arrested but has begun to reverse, and the discourse of Choice has begun to dominate the view of democracy held by large numbers of progressives. Exhortations to “vote for what you believe in,” “vote with your heart” or “be true to yourself” are ostensibly empowering but downplay voting as a community-oriented activity with an attendant collective responsibility, presenting it instead as an act of individual self-actualization: your vote is for you alone, your only responsibility is to yourself, and how you choose to exercise your democratic right is a matter for you, the ballot box, and (if applicable) your god(s).

It’s quite remarkable that such a fundamentalist idea of democracy should take root in the very political communities that generally reject the premise of consequence-free Choice. Yet people who will happily sit in judgement on the act of eating a Yorkie bar, insisting (correctly) that a decision apparently consequence-free at the point of sale can nevertheless uphold oppressive systems and ruin lives at several degrees of remove, are equally happy to insist that the wielding of direct power over fellow citizens at the ballot box is your business alone, accountable to nobody and nothing save your own internal truths.

In the EU referendum, such democratic fundamentalism reached the apex of its destructiveness because it attacked the progressive case for Remain on two different fronts.

First, progressive Leave voters consistently confused means and ends. Progressives who voted Leave did so overwhelmingly because they believed they were voting “for democracy,” as if democracy were a concrete objective rather than a process by which one might achieve an objective. Voting Leave “for democracy” in the EU referendum entailed neglecting equal access and widespread participation as criteria for determining a system’s democratic accountability (though ironically they were invoked frequently in identifying the EU’s democratic deficit), and focusing purely on the availability of Choice. For the pragmatic democrat, a political climate in which unabashedly racist campaigning is allowed to become the norm, and already marginalized communities risk being totally disenfranchised by being made pawns and scapegoats in increasingly toxic debates, constitutes a catastrophic net loss for British democracy. For the democratic fundamentalist, these contextual details simply don’t factor into the equation: increased Choice at the point of sale is all that matters, and the (theoretical) future ability to identify and eject from office the faceless bureaucrat who regulates one’s apples is proof positive of a net increase in democracy.

Second, not only was the fundamentalist notion of democracy-as-Choice the red-line issue that lured many progressive voters to the Leave side; it also absolved them, in advance, of any responsibility for the society that would emerge in the vote’s aftermath. This was, they assured themselves and others, simply a matter of principle: “It’s not who you vote with — it’s what you vote for,” as if these two things weren’t irrevocably intertwined.

And so to the dystopia wrought in part by democratic fundamentalism: the scarred landscape of a post-referendum Britain where social cohesion and progressive causes face their biggest crisis in a generation or more. In Brexit Britain a variety of malevolent genies fly free, the spells for re-bottling them having been torn up or lost. And challenges that were formidable enough inside the EU look very nearly insurmountable from without.

Somehow, we must re-establish as an inviolable principle that British democracy offers no place — and certainly no reward — for racist campaigning that excludes, alienates, and demonizes whole sections of the electorate, even though the Leave campaign’s victory sent exactly the opposite message.

Somehow, we must mount an effective opposition to transatlantic trade deals that outsource our sovereignty to corporations, even though such decisions are now in the hands of homegrown free-market zealots, free from the constraining influence of progressive European neighbours who have already promised to veto such deals.

Somehow, we must persuade a government that scuppered EU attempts to introduce binding legislation to regulate fracking and protect our air quality of the necessity of responsible environmental stewardship.

Somehow, we must dissuade an administration that has hitherto demonstrated a slavish ideological adherence to austerity not to impose further cuts on the most disadvantaged and vulnerable as it attempts to deal with Brexit’s economic fallout.

Somehow.

The most heartening development in the face of these challenges has been the talk of a cross-party progressive alliance, led by such stalwarts of the left as Caroline Lucas, and embodying the late Jo Cox’s dictum that what unites us continues to be greater than what divides us. But for this alliance to stand any chance of succeeding, it will need to rely on a conception of democracy very different from the one that animated voters in the EU referendum: a democracy that is collective rather than individualistic, answerable to its community rather than consequence-free, compromised and pragmatic rather than ideologically pure.

To begin to accomplish this change, let’s tweak the underlying metaphor. Consider the voter as neither religious celebrant nor consumer but as triage nurse, wielding limited but vital power. In rolls the bruised and battered nation on a gurney, gasping for breath; your role is to decide to which operating room you’ll send the patient to be patched up, under the care of which surgeon the patient’s chances of making it though are the greatest. By all means, when you’re off-shift, spend your every free moment lobbying the hospital administrators to employ more and better surgeons and build more operating rooms. But when the patient arrives, your choice is simple: A or B. (C if you’re extremely lucky and the hospital is unusually well-equipped.)

How best to perform your role? Well, a good starting point might be to adopt a Hippocratic principle of democracy: First, do no harm. If the surgeons in Operating Room A and Operating Room B are both offering remedies that might plausibly aid the patient, congratulations: you have a genuine choice to make. If the surgeon in Operating Room A offers quack remedies and has some suspicious ties to drug companies, take a very close look at the surgeon in Operating Room B. This is important: if he looks like he can’t wait to get his hands on the corpse and start experimenting, throw in your lot with the quack.

If your politics are progressive, vote for the least regressive alternative. Vote Labour or Lib Dem to keep out a Tory; vote Tory if UKIP is the only other item on the menu. And if the race to the bottom precipitated by Brexit continues at its current rate, and your constituency offers you a straight choice between Paul Golding and Nigel Farage in 2020, learn, however temporarily, to love a xenophobe in a striped blazer.

And that gnawing sense of disappointment and frustration in your gut? Embrace it, proudly. It’s your reminder that responsible democracy is neither freedom nor Choice. Democracy doesn’t come for free; it costs and it hurts. Sometimes, depending on the quality of the options, all you get to choose is who it hurts, and how much. And in those circumstances, better your bruised principles than somebody else’s bruised face. Better a sullied, compromised Good Samaritan than a principled bystander. Welcome to the world of the pragmatic democrat.