Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
sense. And it’s supposed to be in our constitution: one person, one vote. That’s not what happened here.’64 Anybody might have imagined that this system had just been invented to get the Republican candidate elected, rather than being the same one under which every Democratic Party president has entered the White House. Everybody’s vote has never been of equal value under a system designed to restrain democracy in the name of representation. These sudden converts to electoral reform were only objecting now because too many of those persons had cast their one vote for Trump.
The same seemed true of the high-level demands for recounts of votes in several key states, supposedly because the polls might have been ‘hacked’ by Russian cyber-terrorists. Can anybody imagine such ‘principled’ protests in defence of American democracy being backed by the establishment if Clinton had been elected?
Endorsing claims that Russia somehow hacked the US election ‘to promote a Trump win’, one liberal blogger announced that ‘the only Constitutional solution available to us is for the electoral college to serve the function that the Framers intended for it, namely to serve as a check on elections gone wrong’.65 Thus the radical wing of American liberalism lined up with the most conservative Founding Fathers in their determination to halt the ‘wrong’ election results. What ultimately unites them is contempt for millions of voters whom they cannot comprehend.
Of course, Trump is no champion of American democracy – commentators had fun unearthing his tweets calling for a ‘revolution’ to overthrow Obama’s election win in 2012.66 He is an illiberal at heart who poses a potential threat to precious liberties such as freedom of speech.
But the backlash against ‘illegitimate’ Trump voters is a sham defence of democracy that is just another attack on the independence of the demos. Anybody must have the legitimate right to protest against a president they don’t support or to demand genuine democratic reforms. Demanding backroom deals among the political elite to overturn an election result you don’t like, however, is potentially far more dangerous to the future of democracy than a President Trump.
However the arguments have been packaged, there is one underlying message of the backlash against Brexit and Trump: that ‘too much’ democracy is dangerous. The elites do not trust the mass of voters because they believe we are too unintelligent, misinformed and emotional to make the right decisions on important issues. And they do not really trust a lot of politicians either, who they think only win elections by pandering to the base appetites and instincts of the vulgar voters. An anti-democratic prejudice about lying ‘populist’ political demagogues and stupid voters is taking hold across the political and cultural elites on both sides of the Atlantic.
Open debate about borders
The Brexit referendum vote was not a racist backlash but a revolt of the Others. It opened up the opportunity for a new kind of political debate about the future of our society, involving many who had previously been excluded from public life. Instead the reaction from the Clerisy and the political elites was to use it as an argument for even less democracy and openness in future: they want no more simple referendums on big issues, a bigger role for the courts in policing politics, official fact-checkers to sanitise ‘post-truth’ politics by restricting freedom of speech.
But more free speech and democracy, not less, is the best possible way forward, to give us a chance of addressing divided opinions, settling political differences and deciding which way to go. There is no point calling for unity and then demanding silence from dissenting viewpoints on any side. Democracy is about divided opinions and debate as to the way we shape our future.
An open democratic debate, for example, involving all opinions, represents our only chance of resolving a divisive issue such as immigration in UK and Western politics today.
In recent years, the prevailing view in British public life has been that anybody who raises the issue of immigration risks being branded a racist. This has suppressed debate on the question. Those deluded enough to imagine that was the same thing as winning the argument for open borders have had a rude awakening.
The first thing we need to do is clarify the issue through a clash of opinions rather than an exchange of insults. Concerns about immigration in the UK today generally have little in common with old-fashioned send-them-back racism. Instead mass immigration to the UK, especially from Eastern Europe, has become a symbol of the way that many people feel their world has been changed without anybody asking them. They have woken up to find that their communities are disintegrating, their traditional values trashed from on high. Some of their new neighbours may have their own native tongues, but the ones who really seem to speak a foreign language are the UK elites ignoring the UK’s own ‘ghastly people’.
In particular since the New Labour government of the late 1990s, mass immigration to the UK has been encouraged and organised from the top down, but without any public debate about its benefits or costs to society. Indeed any attempt at discussing immigration has been effectively barred as racist. Think of Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, unknowingly recorded dismissing a lifelong Labour voter as ‘some bigoted woman’ because she asked him about Romanian immigration on camera in the 2010 general election campaign.
Britain’s borders have effectively been opened by the state, not as a consequence of governments or experts winning an argument for mass immigration, but instead by avoiding one and going ahead without public consent. In this context the immigration issue has become another symbol of the yawning gap between millions of people and the political establishment, of the absence of democracy and open public debate. You did not need to be a racist to revolt against that state of affairs.
Those who want a more liberal, open society would do better trying to win an argument for one than condemning those who disagree with them as xenophobes and thugs. The fact is that the precondition for any progressive policy on migration is establishing democratic control over borders – and then winning a democratic debate about the need to open them. The alternative of leaving it to the closed world of courts and Euro-commissions can only make matters worse.
Free speech and democratic debate are our best tools to tackle the political and cultural divide in our societies and arrive at some conclusions. Yet we live in a culture of conformism where the motto of the age is You Can’t Say That, ‘offensive’ opinions are frowned upon or banned, and ideas that stray from the straight and increasingly narrow path approved by the Clerisy are ruled out-of-bounds.
One incident that highlighted this divide after the EU referendum came with the prosecution of the former England footballer Paul Gascoigne, ex-working-class hero, fallen national treasure and psychiatrically challenged alcoholic, for a race-hate crime. In 2015, during a desperate attempt to raise funds, the sad ghost of Gascoigne had staged An Evening With Gazza show in Wolverhampton. While on stage he said to his black security guard, ‘Can you smile please, I can’t see you.’ For cracking this unfunny and insensitive joke, Gascoigne was hauled into court in September 2016 and convicted of the ‘racially aggravated’ offence of using ‘threatening or abusive words’. Most telling were the threatening words used by the judge in sentencing Gazza. M’lud made clear that he was making an example of the faded star to send a message to others. ‘We live in the twenty-first century,’ the judge proclaimed. ‘Grow up with it or keep your mouth closed!’67 It is not necessary to defend what Gascoigne said in order to see that sort of censorious court order as no laughing matter.
You might interpret this sorry incident as evidence of the hidden epidemic of white working-class racism behind the Brexit vote. Or, alternatively, as a sign of the contempt with which the white working class and its old habits – such as telling naughty jokes – are held in high places. That helped to provoke the pro-Brexit backlash among millions who had had enough of being told to ‘keep your mouth closed’ by those who look down on them from the judges’ bench of life.
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