Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
We live at a strange moment in the history of democratic politics. Today, perhaps for the first time, every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle. Yet in practice the authorities are seeking to limit democratic decision-making and separate power from the people.
They invest authority instead in unelected institutions, from the courts to the European Commission. Elected politicians act as a professional elite, divorced from those they are supposed to represent. And everywhere, the intellectual fashion is to question whether voters are really fit or qualified to make democratic decisions on major issues, such as membership of the European Union or the Presidency of the United States.
Ours is the age of ‘I’m a democrat, but …’, when the establishment insists it is all for democracy, but only in moderation; it just cannot tolerate what one former member of President Barack Obama’s administration calls ‘too much of a good thing’, suggesting that America ‘might be a healthier democracy if it were a slightly less democratic one’.1 For some in high places these days it seems that, where democracy is concerned, less really can be more.
It is an attitude captured in the UK by former Conservative prime minister John Major who, dismissing the suggestion that the Brexit referendum result should be binding, declared that ‘the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy’.2 Some of us might naively have imagined that majority rule was the essence of democracy. But not, it seems, when millions of common ‘tyrants’ vote against the wishes of the minority political elite.
It is time we started not only to defend popular democracy, but to argue for far more of it, with no ifs, buts or by-your-leaves.
So this is not just a book about Brexit, or about Trump. The best place to begin the argument, however, is with the fallout from that UK referendum and the US election, which has brought the bigger picture sharply into focus. Whichever side you were on in those votes, the wider issue of your right to decide is now on the line.
In Animal Farm, his 1945 allegorical novel about the Soviet Union’s descent from popular revolution to Stalinist tyranny, George Orwell gives one of the great definitions of the betrayal of democracy. It becomes clear that the farm has turned into a totalitarian system when the powerful elite of pigs alters the founding principle of Animal Farm painted on the barn wall. To the noble declaration ‘All Animals Are Equal’ they add the qualification ‘… But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others’.3
Of course that’s only dystopian fiction from 1945, in the faraway era of world war and totalitarianism. Even Orwell originally entitled it Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. It couldn’t happen here.
Fast-forward to September 2016 and the director of the pollsters BritainThinks goes on BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning Today programme, to discuss the findings of their focus-group conversations with voters from both sides of the June referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.
Deborah Mattinson reported that some of the victorious Leave voters ‘think the Remainers are rich people’ who had benefited from the status quo within the EU. Something of a generalisation no doubt, but fair enough, perhaps. That argument at least acknowledges that those Remain voters had made a reasonable decision that might be seen as in their own self-interests. Think-tank research did find that, in the words of one Tory newspaper, ‘Britain’s ruling classes were the only group to vote overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union’.4
And what about the other side of the divide? What did the losing Remain voters in Mattinson’s focus groups think of the opposite lot? Well, she said bluntly, ‘Some of the Remainers think that some of the Leavers were stupid and shouldn’t have the vote.’ This revelation almost had Today’s world-weary host John Humphrys choking on his croissant.5
So it became possible, not in the allegorical dystopias of 1940s fairy tales but in the real world of twenty-first-century British politics, to hear it seriously proposed by some that some members of the electorate, though formally qualified to participate in our democracy, are ‘stupid and shouldn’t have the vote’. Or as Orwell’s oligarchical pigs might have put it, ‘All Voters Are Equal, But Some Voters Are More Equal Than Others.’
That report was no one-off. The ‘too thick to vote’ point might have been particularly blunt, but the underlying sentiment was the stuff of countless tweets, posts, articles, outbursts and reports in response to the referendum. The essential message was that all those Leave voters don’t know what’s good for them. The implication was that they should not have been allowed the right to make the wrong choice on such an issue.
That sneering attitude was even reflected in the satirical magazine Private Eye; under the spoof headline ‘Turkeys Vote for Christmas in Referendum Cliffhanger’, it reported that some turkeys were already regretting their ‘Brexmas vote’ as ‘evidence is piling up that, come Christmas lunch, they will in fact have their heads cut off, their giblets put in a plastic bag and be well and truly stuffed’. If it was irony the Eye was after, how about ‘Satirists Side with Establishment’?6
Then came the second political earthquake of 2016 – the November election of Republican candidate and celebrity capitalist Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The bitter responses to the voters’ failure to elect Democratic Party favourite Hillary Clinton were if anything even more starkly anti-democratic than the anti-Brexit backlash.
‘Your Vote is a Hate Crime!’ declared anti-Trump protesters, graffiti artists and bloggers, implying that Trump supporters should be denied not only their vote, but their liberty.7
One leading Democrat commentator issued the blanket declaration that ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter’. Meanwhile a celebrity professor of political science drew the no doubt scientific conclusion that Trump’s victory was ‘the dance of the dunces’, made possible by wasting the right to vote on ‘uneducated, low-information white people’.8 Some voters, it appears, are now deemed ‘more equal than others’ because they are considered better-informed, or just better people.
As with the barn in Animal Farm, here too it appears that the writing is on the wall. The Brexit vote and the Trump election have shone the spotlight on democracy. Many in the upper reaches of politics, the media and culture do not like what they see.
They fear that they are witnessing a revolt of those whom candidate Clinton branded ‘the deplorables’ during the US election campaign. And they find the idea of such deplorable people exercising democratic power frankly revolting.
Reservations about allowing the people to vote and have some power over their lives have been around ever since the ancient Greeks invented the concept of democracy. As we explore in chapter 3, even in the modern era democracy was long considered a dirty word in the upper echelons of Western societies. It is only in more recent times that these prejudices have been restrained beneath the surface of polite society, as everybody has felt obliged to pay lip service to the principle of democracy.
But the fury of the political, economic and cultural elites in response to the 17.4 million UK voters who dared to back Brexit, and the 62 million-plus Americans who had the temerity to vote for Trump, brought these anti-democratic poisons bubbling to the surface of our civilised societies once more.
The real Brexit–Trump connection
There has been a concerted attempt to explain the link between the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump. For angry social media commentators, it seemed obvious that ‘both were clearly mired in racism, bigotry and hate’. Many mainstream media pundits took a similar line, concluding that ‘both votes were marked by