Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">22 He might have been describing the 9/11 terror attacks on America rather than a disappointing election result. Liberal film-maker Jim Jarmusch expanded further on that theme, explaining that ‘the election of Trump is not only a tragedy for the United States. It is a tragedy for the world’.23
Meanwhile on American college campuses, students held a ‘cry-in’ (Cornell) or staged a collective ‘primal scream’ (Yale) to demonstrate their trauma and pain at the ‘sickening’ election of Trump. In turn, college authorities cancelled exams and offered their students counselling and time off to ‘grieve’, as if they were all the victims of an unexpected natural disaster, or perhaps an unheralded alien invasion.24
These reactions to both Brexit and Trump appeared different from the normal responses to an electoral setback. It was not simply that the losing side did not agree with the voters’ verdict; it did not understand how they could possibly have reached it. The defeated establishment figures found the results not just uncomfortable, but entirely incomprehensible.
In short these seemed like more than ordinary electoral defeats. They signalled deep divisions and, above all, a cultural revolt – the near-total rejection of the values of the ruling elites by a sizeable section of the electorate. The subsequent response has been not to doubt the efficacy of those top-down values, but to question the wisdom of allowing the revolting masses to pass judgement on them from below.
Two nations
The divides laid bare by the EU referendum in the UK and Trump’s election in the US brought to mind the leading Victorian Benjamin Disraeli, later to become a Tory prime minister, who described in his novel Sybil, Or the Two Nations (1845) a state of ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.’25 The divide today, however, is not quite such a black-and-white – or ‘binary’ – split caused simply by differences in wealth.
In the UK the divisions revealed by the EU referendum have been endlessly analysed along demographic lines, to show that young people were more likely to vote Remain than older people, or that higher votes for Remain were often found in areas with higher numbers of graduates from higher education and vice versa, or that most poorer people voted to Leave.
There is something in these attempts to analyse the divide. Class divisions certainly played an important part. But the focus on demographic divisions tends to make them appear permanent and immovable. The most important divides revealed by the results in the UK and the US, however, were surely the political and cultural splits across society today. This points up the importance of democratic debate – a clash between differing sets of values – to decide which direction our societies want to take.
Such meaningful debates have been scarce in recent times. Instead politics and public life in the UK, the US and other Western societies have increasingly become the preserve of a professional elite of officials, opinion formers and experts. This professionalised political elite relates to the rest of society through the media, if at all. Meanwhile millions of those patronised as ‘ordinary people’ have been treated as Others, deemed outside of politics and beyond the pale, their concerns marginalised and ignored.
If there is a gap between those who did and did not go to university in the UK, for example, it is not simply that Remainers are smart and Leavers ‘too thick to vote’. It is more that those who participate in higher education – now around 40 per cent of young people in the UK – tend to be imbued with very different values, which reject most traditional ideas still dear to many in the world outside the university campus.
The new class of intellectual and moral elitists has been well described by the US writer Joel Kotkin as a ‘Clerisy’, a term he borrows from the English philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some 180 years ago, notes Kotkin, Coleridge described approvingly an educated, enlightened middle class that would serve a priestly function for society. He called them a Clerisy, adapted from Klerisei, a German word for clergy. One dictionary suggests that ‘Coleridge may have equated clerisy with an old sense of clergy meaning “learning” or “knowledge”’, which by his time was used in the proverb ‘an ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy’.26 The poet wanted to reassert the authority of the enlightened elite he called the Clerisy over the base ‘mother wit’ of the masses.
Now, says Kotkin, what we have in both the US and Europe is a New Clerisy of middle-class professionals who dominate politics, culture, education and the media, ‘serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth’.27 Kotkin observed in the run-up to the 2012 US presidential election that: ‘Many of [the Clerisy’s] leading lights appear openly hostile to democracy … They believe that power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats, but with credentialed “experts” whether operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.’ That hostility to democracy has only intensified over the past few years.
The Brexit vote marked a breakthrough revolt of ‘the common man’ and woman against the ‘enforced conformity’ preached by the New Clerisy. That it came as such a shock to the Clerisy was a sign of how little contact they had with the real world occupied by Other People.
They might have done well to note the report by David Cowling, former head of the BBC’s political research unit, which was leaked just before the referendum. He noted that: ‘There are many millions of people in the UK who do not enthuse about diversity and do not embrace metropolitan values yet do not consider themselves lesser human beings for all that. Until their values and opinions are acknowledged and respected, rather than ignored and despised, our present discord will persist.’
Cowling observed that ‘these discontents run very wide and very deep and the metropolitan political class, confronted by them, seems completely bewildered and at a loss about how to respond (“who are these ghastly people and where do they come from?” doesn’t really hack it).’
His report concluded that the EU referendum had ‘witnessed the cashing in of some very bitter bankable grudges’ but that throughout the campaign ‘Europe has been the shadow not the substance.’ The ‘ghastly people’ had simply seized upon the EU referendum and voted Leave as a way to express their long-held wide and deep discontent with the elite who so obviously despised them.28
A few months later, the November 2016 US presidential election marked another remarkable revolt against the New Clerisy’s values of ‘enforced conformism’. As with Brexit, the elitist view of Trump’s victory as ‘incomprehensible’ only demonstrated how detached the US establishment had become from the lives and concerns of millions of Americans.
After the election, everybody suddenly started asking ‘How could They vote for HIM?’ It should not have been too difficult to get sensible answers beforehand. It was just that nobody had bothered to ask ‘them’. Belatedly, some major media outlets did attempt the basic journalistic job of talking to voters. When the Washington Post asked its readers to give a brief post-election explanation of ‘Why I Voted for Trump’, it had soon received more than 1600 revealing responses.
Many of them were at pains to emphasise that, in the words of one voter, ‘I do not 100 per cent love Donald Trump’, and to disassociate themselves from his comments about women and wild outbursts about immigrants. They had voted not so much for Trump as against the establishment that ignored them and backed Clinton; his reported misogynistic remarks had not swayed them, for example, because they never thought or cared about him being a feminist anyway.
As forty-seven-year-old Nicole Citro of Burlington, Virginia, wrote in her contribution to the Post, she ‘saw how the media, the