One way to make sense of Britain’s decision to quit Europe is to gaze across the Atlantic. Not long ago, during the years of the second Bush presidency, millions of America’s poorest citizens proved to be the Republican Party’s staunchest supporters. A blindly loyal core of voters stuck with the party even though its neoliberal policies had wiped out their jobs and devastated their communities. They did so largely because the GOP under the influence of the political strategist Karl Rove, had perfected the alchemy of turning divisive social issues into electoral gold.
In a book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank surveyed the GOP’s tactics for what Rove called “a ‘mobilization election’ in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful.” Among other things, campaigns devised along these lines entailed scaremongering appeals to rightwing Christian voters about the sort of godless government that liberals wanted to impose (gay marriage, abortion, socialism). “For the conservative rank and file,” Frank writes, the 2004 American election became a “culture-war Armageddon, [in which] they were battling for the Lord.”
For many English voters – and the passions driving the Leave campaign should be thought of as English rather than the more inclusive ‘British’ – Brussels’ bureaucrats stood for many of the same evils as the Washington overlords that the Kansan Republican voters wanted, desperately, to be rid of. Like the Kansans, the Leave voters were fed up with remote elites imposing ‘progressive’ policies that sounded irrelevant to the common man. They hated outsiders telling them what to do, and worse yet, letting foreigners into the country to steal jobs from hard-working locals. They didn’t want their taxes shipped off to support other people’s bright ideas, and they wanted politicians who sounded like they ‘got’ this message – regardless of whether they were, in fact, from well-established political dynasties, like the Bush family, or graduates of self-consciously elite institutions like Eton and Oxford, like David Cameron and Boris Johnson. These confused motives and interests produced an unprecedented level of disingenuous campaigning in the US, so it is hardly surprising that many of the misleading factoids, half-truths and insinuations used to mobilize the ‘Leave’ vote came straight out of the Rove playbook.
Occasionally, leading advocates of the Leave campaign dropped all pretence of restraint and made their case directly. Shortly before the referendum the UK Independence Party (UKIP) released a poster with ‘Breaking Point’ hovering over a photograph which showed, in the words of Spectator columnist Alex Massie, “a queue of dusky-hued refugees waiting to cross a border.” As Massie notes, “The message was not very subtle: Vote Leave, Britain, or be over-run by brown people. … If you want a Turk – or a Syrian – for a neighbour, vote Remain.” It didn’t really matter that the border shown in the poster wasn’t Britain’s, nor that the UK has in fact retained near total control of its borders, far more so than any comparable European country. This Fascist poster worked its magic and a large fraction of the British electorate responded with predictable fear rather than ask themselves from whom, exactly, was England being recovered, and, perhaps as importantly, from when?
The Leave campaign appealed to ideas of a nation state which have become almost irrelevant in an age of post-industrial market economies. Yet the solidarity amongst these market states should not be lightly underestimated. While several EU members have faced serious crises as they struggled to adapt to the new economic landscape – the so-called PIGS economies (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) being the best-known – many others have negotiated the transition successfully, and flourished. Just as significantly, the economic integration has made the prospect of widespread military conflict within Europe vanishingly small. By abandoning the EU at such a pivotal time, Britain has thumbed its nose at these achievements and not only isolated itself culturally, but surrendered its chance to shape some of the world’s most consequential political, social, military and economic decisions.
Polls indicate that the Leave campaign was far more popular with older citizens – ie those with the smallest long-term incentives to travel, work and live in Europe. This is largely a legacy of the Thatcher years in which a vast amount of Britain’s wealth was transferred to a small slice of its middle class, mostly through soaring stock markets and real estate bubbles. The euroscepticism of this smugly well-off group underwrote a great deal of the apathy that has allowed the Brexit vote to succeed, and history will not judge its complacency, or complicity, kindly. But Britain’s ignominious exit from Europe should be placed firmly on the shoulders of its blundering prime minister and the strident Little Englanders who are now preening themselves on their unlikely victory. As the full extent of their folly becomes clearer, it can only be hoped that American voters are paying attention to the buyer’s remorse of those who have succumbed to populist rhetoric without really considering its long-term consequences.
