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“Europe” became, for some of them, the embodiment of everything else that had gone wrong,
he wrote before the referendum, Heffer described the EU, an organization that Britain had helped lead for two generations, as “a foreign power overruling [our] courts and [our] elected government.” He described the Leave campaigners
there can be no black “Englishmen,”
The concept of “Englishness” also excluded the British Irish of Belfast, after all, as well as the British Scots of Glasgow and everyone else in the United Kingdom’s Gaelic fringe.
the nostalgic conservatives laid the groundwork for a Brexit campaign that felt, to those who supported it, like the last chance to save the country,
If we left the EU, Johnson claimed, there would be an extra £350 million a week—an
an imaginary number—for the National Health Service.
Farage appeared in front of a poster showing huge crowds of Syrians trekking toward Europe, even though there was no reason why any of th...
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stoking immigration fears and false promises
it bore no relation to reality, it was viewed 515,000 times.
England would be destroyed by hordes of brown foreigners.
If Brexit could be that revolution, then anything that led to Brexit, from false spending claims to data manipulation
to attacks on the judiciary to Russian money, was acceptable. That prospect of extreme change continued to inspire and motivate them, even when it ran into trouble.
quite a few Brexiteers, especially the ones who worked for the tabloid press, were disgusted by the actual democratic institutions of
the United Kingdom in practice.
Rowland put it to me. Oligarchs would be
they dislike Orbán’s “Christian” values.
it may be that big, ideological changes are not caused by bread shortages but by new kinds of disruptions.
the “authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness:
people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.
What factors, in the modern world, might provoke people to react against complexity?
In Hungary, as Mária Schmidt
acknowledged, there are scarcely any foreigners and yet the ruling party has successfully stoked xenophobia.
“The economy” or “inequality” does not explain why, at that exact moment, everybody got very angry.
Something else is going on right now, something that is affecting very different democracies, with very different economics and very different demographics, all over the world.
Alongside the revival of nostalgia, the disappointment with meritocracy, and the appeal of conspiracy theories, a part of the answer may lie in the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse
The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement—these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative.
Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that “somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science…there is a final solution.” Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group—all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: “to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals
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Opinions differed, but at least most people were arguing within agreed parameters. That world has vanished.
many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative.
People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.
False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires,
Dominic Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign proved it was possible to lie, repeatedly, and to get away with it.
If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they
Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.
The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of “normal” politics, “establishment” politicians, derided “experts,” and “mainstream” institutions—including courts, police, civil servants—and no wonder.
There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.
You can press a button on your phone and buy a pair of shoes, but it can take months to form a government coalition in Sweden.
that prefers unity and homogeneity. Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the
rest.
Over the past decade, that consensus has shattered. In response to the economic
crisis of 2009, a new far-left party, Podemos, challenged the unity of the center left.
the party’s constant attacks on the “fake” opinion polls in the “biased” media, had a purpose.
That was the central pillar of Vox’s strategy: use social media to create a feeling of unity around a movement that didn’t yet quite exist.
New political parties now operate like that: you can bundle together issues, repackage them, and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging—based on exactly the same kind of market research—that you know has worked in other places.
Although the proportion of actual Spanish Muslims is low—most immigration to Spain is from Latin America—the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has a special historic
echo in Spain.
These links between Vox and the Trump administration suggest not a conspiracy, but common interests and common tactics.
some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third. These issues are unrelated—there
In recent years, similar kinds of sites have begun to work in concert, across borders, in different languages.
