Why it is not unfair to think of (nearly all) Brexiteers as racists

Whether it is politically sensible to call them racists or xenophobes is a different matter

Well, yes. This is the Emily Thornberry problem. Once you’ve called people racists they’re going to stop listening to you and stop voting for you. You don’t have any solidarity with them so why should they have any with you?

More generally, the labelling tendency of the moralistic left to talk of racist people rather than racist acts results in a disastrous Corbynist search for purity. You can only be in the party if you’ve never done something that can be interpreted as racist, sexist or homophobic by a hostile inquisition that’s prepared to quote you out of context. Everyone must be without sin so they can throw the first stone.

Oh, and there’s no redemption possible either.

(The interaction between anti-racism and anti-semetism has also become weird – one is not a subset of the other)

“More generally, the labelling tendency of the moralistic left to talk of racist people rather than racist acts results in a disastrous Corbynist search for purity.”

I find the framing of this objection quite odd, as if racist acts commit themselves, without need of any help by racist people.

Since we’re almost certainly about to have another go around who-are-the-real-racists I’m going to link to this useful glossary that was the first thing to come up when I googled “structural racism”.

https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/docs/rcc/RCC-Structural-Racism-Glossary.pdf

We’re all complicit in racism to the extent that we benefit from a racist society but there’s still a distinction to be made between complicity, wilful ignorance, and active support… and I agree with Chris Bertram that the vast majority of Brexit supporters clearly belong in the latter two categories.

@Layman

“I find the framing of this objection quite odd, as if racist acts commit themselves, without need of any help by racist people.”

Do you believe there is such a thing as a “criminal type”, who is necessarily and intrinsically criminal? Most people of the left would say no – crime is a product of the environment, the focus of criminal justice should be on rehabilitation, felons should be allowed to vote and be re-employed when they leave prison, and so on.

Whereas the court of public opinion on “racism”, when limited to speech acts, recognises no statute of limitations and has no concept of a spent conviction. Once someone’s ever said something racist they are forever unsuitable for public life, amirite?

( I haven’t tried trolling someone into saying “yes” to should prisoners be allowed to vote and “no” to ‘should old people and racists have been allowed to vote for Brexit’. Nobody sensible has actually come out and said that yet, but the rhetoric sometimes comes very close.)

@4: This shortish interview with Mark Blyth will hopefully clarify matters some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK0jeJ8wxg

To add: “racist motives” are almost always imputed by people with no knowledge whatsoever of the perpetrators states of mind, and by and large never form a sufficient explanation, even as they are always treated as such — the prime tell on this front is that as soon as the ‘racist’ and/or ‘religious fundamentalist’ card is played, all other considerations are dismissed by the ‘judge’ as inconsequential “because it is categorically wrong to act on racist beliefs”. This line of argument is wholly circular, unprovable/dogmatic.

And I’ll add that Foppe (and Pete) seem to me to be correct. The idea that you can reject solidarity with a majority of your country people because they’re racists in favor of a moralistic “solidarity” with the peoples of the world seems to me like a particularly academic / professional deformation of morality as naturally being how academics and professionals think about their interests.

Solidarity is usually not one way — usually that is called something like patronage or clientelism. What kind of reciprocal or universal solidarity is being imagined here that operates in any real way and that requires anything in return from its objects?

Chris, so your definition of racist is “has a different concept than you of who is a member of his community (and deserves special considerations) and who is not”?

@14: That’s all well and good, but that presupposes that joining the EU’s “open market” (at the speed that they have, furthermore) was the best way to help out the Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. — including those who still live in those countries. I am not at all convinced that joining the neoliberal (again, see the Maastricht Treaty, David Harvey’s books, e.g. A Brief History, for my reasons as to why I call it that) institutional framework called the EU was in fact the best solution (leaving aside that it was highly desired, for reasons having to do with public perception) for the people living in those countries.

@19: Not just theirs. Also ours, insofar as we then had control over our governments when they acted in concert as the rulers of the EC. And “we” had very specific ideas wrt under what terms they could/should accede, at which speed, etc. etc.

Mrs Tilton@21, I am a bit rusty with the Gospel, but did Jesus mention “the full complexity of the rights that need reviewing”?

@5

“glibalization”

The process by which economic problems become easy talking points?

It must be difficult to be an English RC UKIPper. Are the Poles in your in-group or not?

I knew a conservative English RC who used to attend Polish masses as it was a modern language he didn’t know, and thus the next best thing to getting a Latin Mass.

It’s a bit much to expect Englishmen to act in solidarity with Poles, when they can barely bring themselves to act in solidarity with Scots. Come to think of it, how much solidarity is there between Yorkshiremen and the residents of the home counties? Lack of empathy isn’t necessarily racism.

Hello Chris
You may not be surprised by the revelation that I voted for Brexit. I wonder whether you can find it within yourself to accept that my reasons for doing so have absolutely nothing to do with racism. I voted for Brexit because of this ONS population projection published in 2010, according to which the UK’s population will rise from 62.3m (2010) to 73m by 2035:-http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/npp/national-population-projections/2010-based-reference-volume–series-pp2/results.html

How is the UK is going to absorb enough extra people to fill Edinburgh every year for twenty years. Where will they be housed? Where will their kids go to school? What hospitals will they be treated in? Which parts of the countryside are you content to see handed over to the road-builders?

And what on earth do these concerns have to do with the ridiculous and irrational belief that people should be evaluated on the basis of their race?

Tabasco, the ones who want to leave the Union are not the Englishmen, but (some of) the Scots: I realize that it’s difficult to tell the difference, but they are quite picky about it (narcissism of small differences and all that).

Come to think of it: a new independence referendum seems likely; would Bertram accuse the Scots voting for leave of being racist?

Will, with that criterion, everything must remind you of fascism.
Including most people and countries that actually fought against it.

Who is a member of the national community and who is not is one usually decided by the community itself, and the laws governing it are called citizenship laws.
Those who are not Polish citizens are not members of the Polish national community, and the same holds for UK.

The laws themselves may be unjust, or too strict, or whatever.
But once Bertram posits that there are special obligations to member of one’s national community he cannot then pretend that those obligations extends to people who are not member of said community, and call racists those who don’t vote accordingly.

34: “And what kind of reciprocal concern are they supposed to have?”

Rich, CB is referring to foreigners who *live in the UK*, “who live in your street, go to your school, work in your workplace, shop in your supermarket and are in all ordinary respects social members of British communities”. Of course there is reciprocity, they pay the same taxes and obey the same laws as Brits do. The effect of Brexit is that of unilaterally taking away their rights. If you find it hard to even understand the call for solidarity for members of your community whose fundamental rights are being called into question on account of them not having the right nationality, maybe you have spent too much time making up excuses for racist Trumpists.

As I wrote in another recent thread here, people should figure out what they really believe. As an anarchist, I’m against both the nation-state and large-scale democracy. But if you support them, then you can’t suddenly say that they are irrelevant when that’s convenient. You also sort of have to think about the differences between sham democracy and real democracy and about what happens when people make a democratic decision that you don’t like.

If freedom to travel for jobs means that professionals can travel there for work, and that lower-income jobs in the UK can be taken by people traveling in, but that there’s no particular reason to travel the other way

Writing something like this really does indicate that your level of knowledge about how free movement of labour works in the EU isn’t all that great. Yes, professional people also move to the UK to take jobs, particularly in professional services and management. And indeed, British people work overseas in bars and building sites, among other occupations.

Also Manta, if we want to talk about “most of the people who fought against fascism”, just based on casualty counts on the Eastern and Western fronts (to say nothing of “premature anti-fascists” like the International Brigades) the median person we’re talking about would be a communist. And while the resemblance between the USSR and Nazi Germany can be debated in both productive and unproductive ways until the cows come home, it’s certainly not unreasonable to claim that an unapologetic embrace of Russian nationalism is a major reason reason why Stalin is popular in today’s Russia while Lenin isn’t.

Interesting article that may be relevant to the discussion: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/magazine/the-easiest-way-to-get-rid-of-racism-just-redefine-it.html?_r=0

Particularly the point about how essentializing and moralizing racism serves to divert attention away from systematic kinds (Pete’s comparison to the concept of criminality is apt, though I don’t think you have to accept entirely environmental explanations of crime to recognize instances of intending crime don’t require an entire essentialist human typology for their causal explanation–a shame Foucault never wrote about racism…):

“Soon, nearly everyone could agree that racism was the evil work of people with hate in their hearts — bigots. This was a convenient thing for white Americans to believe. Racism, they could say, was the work of racists. And wherever you looked, there were no racists: only good men like Wallace, minding the welfare of their black fellow citizens, or the segregationist South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, defending states’ rights. Racism definitely existed, at some point — no one was out there denying that slavery had happened — but its residue had settled only in the hearts of the most unsavory individuals. Society as a whole didn’t need reform for the sins of a few.

Racism ceased to be a matter of systems and policy and became a referendum on the rot of the individual soul. Calling people racist was no longer a matter of evaluating their opinions; it was an accusation of being irrevocably warped at the very core.”

TM, people who don’t care about those who live next door are usually called “misanthropes”, not “racists”…

Manta 47: when people decide that they don’t want the brown-skinned people living next door in their community, that is racism pure and simple. When they decide they don’t want the queer people next door in their community, it’s homophobia. When they don’t want the Poles next door in their community, one can quibble about the right terminology but racism or xenophobia are good enough.

Rich, you can be an asshole all you want but don’t derail the thread.

Rich why do you expect anyone to extend solidarity to Jewish people when you dismiss Chris for wanting to extend mere concern for non British people living in the same street as him?

This whole thread seems to be a series of justifications for racism. Mediocre!

Manta, at issue is that Brexiters want the rights that they currently have taken away.
You just said that’s ok because they are not part of the community anyway. I won’t say more.

(nicknamed “terroni”: dirty of mud, because the south was still rural while the north was industrial)

OT: there is a familiar process whereby the out-group adopts the in-group’s derogatory label as a badge of honour. There is a southern Italian restaurant here that has done this with “Terroni” (http://www.terroni.com/, originally “I Due Terroni”.) I don’t know anything about the location(s) they’ve opened in LA, but they’re worth a visit if you ever find yourself in Toronto.

Faustusnotes,
I am pretty sure that assaulting people on the street is still against the law, and it will continue to be against the law after Brexit. And that the perpetrators get investigated and arrested (but maybe you have some sources telling otherwise? then I would like to see it).

But please do go on talking with yourself: at least you will feel smug.

TM, if there is anything more to be said about it, it’s about the ease with which people who might otherwise have many complaints about actually-existing liberal democracies as imperfect or insincere manifestations of classical social contract theory, or who might otherwise expound at length about the processes by which ruling elites “manufacture consent” among the governed and so on, are suddenly willing to articulate this link in a totally uncritical way (i.e. “the community itself decided via democratic procedures and rules…”) as soon as the time comes for the people of wealthy nations to assert their economic self-interest in keeping the wretched of the Earth in a proper state of wretchedness.

Indeed, and on an analogous basis, I’m quite tempted to pen a piece titled “Why it is not unfair to think of (nearly all) Marxists as gimlet-eyed mass-murderers”.

Marc, where did Chris say they were evil? How many times do we have to go through this conversation before you admit that your fantasy of the spittle flecked leftist telling people they’re evil is just that – a fantasy?

Manta, you’re the one arguing that the uk polity has defined a bunch of rights that poles don’t have, without specifying what they are or how these lost rights conflict with the op. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt – it’s obvious that the uk polity gets to define who has the right to work in the uk, and they just voted to take it away from 4 or 5 million of their neighbours on the basis of (let’s not be wankers here) race. How is that not racist?

So Manta@61, the existence of nationalist sentiment in the first place is totally organic, right? Not manufactured at all? Innate? As soon as the infant opens its eyes, it starts crying “waaah I pledge allegiance to the flag waaah foreigners are taking our jobs waaah”?

Seriously, if your critique of ideology has no room for the idea that an ideology’s implicit and explicit proscriptions might actually contradict each other (as in, for example, a ruling class tacitly promoting xenophobia as an outlet for populist anti-establishment sentiment precisely so it can have a progressive-sounding excuse to dismiss populism altogether) then TM is right that there’s really nothing more to be said.

Faust: Because I understand the English language, and I’m well aware, as are you, that calling someone a racist is pretty much the worst insult that you can toss out on the left.

If, unlike every other time that large groups of people are slurred and stereotyped, that diagnosis gives some positive course of action, or some measure of listening to people as opposed to labeling them, then it could be useful.

Is being a racist something that can be changed? Once you’ve called someone a racist, what course of action do you take? How do you treat them? Why is stereotyping people an answer to having them adopt stereotypes about others?

Will: you seem to think that the alternative to “the ruling elites like xenophobia” is “hating foreigners is innate”.
I claim that there are other possibilities: like, for instance, that a child living in a house where everybody hates gypsies will also, ad an adult, hate gypsies, no matter what the rulers want.

And anyhow, claiming that the ruling elites are in favor of xenophobia in a thread about Brexit, where all the big wigs were against it, it’s a bit silly.

If you don’t want to call people evil, you describe what you believe to be the effects of the policies they favor using terms other than ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’. This is not hard to do.

“And anyhow, claiming that the ruling elites are in favor of xenophobia in a thread about Brexit, where all the big wigs were against it, it’s a bit silly.”

Whoosh went the point, which to simplify to the utmost is this: ruling elites would rather face xenophobic populism than non-xenophobic populism, because they can pretend they oppose it on the basis of its xenophobia and not on the basis of its populism. Accordingly, they promote allegedly non-xenophobic ideas that directly imply xenophobic ones, e.g. Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers”, and then act shocked when their constituents make the connections they deliberately avoid. (Their willingness to abide any particular populism also appears negatively correlated with its level of xenophobia, e.g. Corbyn faces the Chicken Coup while Boris becomes Foreign Secretary, or Sanders is sidelined while Trump is the GOP nominee.)

I really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this unless you’re actively trying not to.

A relevant quotation from Sam Kriss:

This is why they’re trying to depose Jeremy Corbyn – he refused to be racist enough. The real nature of the complaint is of course buried in metaphor; the preferred euphemism is electability. For years, Labour has attempted to endear itself to the populace by adopting the language of the far right – Gordon Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’; Ed Miliband putting the words ‘controls on immigration’ on an official mug and the rock that would become his tombstone. It’s a curious form of self-abasement: a metropolitan elite, terrified of what it is and desperate to be seen as something else, takes its worst prejudices about the working classes and upholds them as a positive. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t worked – people who do subscribe to racist ideologies will tend to vote for parties that espouse them out of the genuine conviction of evil, rather than those who openly announce that their evil is only a cynical ploy. But it has had the effect of entrenching the language of the far right across the political spectrum, and thereby reinforcing the idiot axiom that you have to speak it to win popular support.

Ok I exaggerated but you claimed that “all the big wigs were against it”. That’s BS. Rupert Murdoch alone gives marching orders to half the political class.

“The establishment” was divided. It clearly wasn’t a case of “the ruling elites” backing Remain and “the people” voting Leave. Also you must recognize that even those Tories who backed Remain had spent much of their careers demonizing the EU. EU-bashing in Britain is definitely an establishment sport even if it likes to pretend to populism. That some of the “bigwigs” who engaged in that sport didn’t actually want the outcome that they factually promoted is ironic but that can happen – plutocrats beware!

Re newspapers: From your link: “The University of Loughborough looked at the tone of coverage of the EU Referendum in the papers and claimed that, weighted by circulation, Leave has an 82% to 18% advantage over Remain.”

no manta, you were arguing it too. So tell me: is it racist to take away the right to work if 5 million people on the basis of their race? Once we have an answer to that we can then discuss whether the people who voted that way are racists or not.

Marc, there are many worse things you can be called than racist, and there is nothing in the word that connotes evil. How is it evil not to like a polish person, or to think they’re taking jobs that English people could do? It’s not evil, it’s racist. Attacking someone on the street for speaking polish is racist and evil, but we’re talking about the vote here not the consequences.

I do wonder how people who equate calling someone racist with calling them evil think. I suspect that people who think these things are equivalent have a personal opinion that anyone who doesn’t see things their way is evil, and therefore assume Chris must have the same way of thinking. I can’t speak for Chris but I know I don’t see racists as evil. Their views are normal, I meet them all the time, we get along, we work together, we play together, it’s a viewpoint. Sure I think it’s bad but evil? No, and it doesn’t make people “worthless” or “beyond the pale” either. it is just the background lose of western politics.

Also, if you think the series racists object to being called racists you need to get out more. For serious racists it’s a badge of honour.

TM@80: fair enough.
I tend to think that Murdoch is over-estimated as political player, but I recognize that I can be wrong.
Regarding the ruling elites: Labor was for Remain, the faction of the Tories which was actually governing was also for remain; the economic elites (as far as I can discern) were broadly for remain. But you are right of course that there was a substantial faction of the Tories for (at least, nominally) leaving: otherwise, there would have been no referendum.

The ‘four freedoms’ of the European Union are the freedom of movement of goods, people, services and capital over borders. These are conceived in classically liberal terms as no state responsibility or capacity to control these flows. If these are principles, and they are to be cast in classical liberal terms as vacating all but a purely administrative accommodation by the state, then it is simply nonsense to talk of “fighting for [anything related to the absence of related authority] within the EU institutions.” Even if there were a fully functional democratic politics in the EU (above the nation-state level) — which is questionable in itself — these principles are sacrosanct and as a consequence there are no policy levers to be grasped even if it were possible to get one’s hand in.

As a liberal cum mild social democrat, I do not have much patience for the classical liberal political philosophy now being held up as sacred in the EU. I want the state to be democratically controlled but powerful, powerful enough to act in the public interest. I do not want the state to manage every detail or even most details — this is how I am not a socialist — but I do want the state to hold the last residual of latent power so that it can respond to emergent problems effectively. I see the problems of corruption and oligarchy and the ease with which electorates are manipulated and I question whether my faith in democracy makes much sense, but I do not see disabling the state as a solution — it seems like surrender, because in the absence of the political capacity of the state, power doesn’t disappear, it shifts to other actors and forces.

Saying the state should have the authority and institutional capacity to manage immigration, or capital flows, or trade flows as needed does not seem like it should be such a huge stretch of the political imagination. Nor that the state should be accountable to a democratic electorate as a way of keeping open the possibility of public policy driven by a public interest.

Of course, I do not want racial epithets being used to rally miscreants among the mob. But, that just seems like a distraction from a legitimate and fundamental issue: whether the classical liberal four freedoms are good political design.

I don’t see how Greece can be helped, without enabling the state to manage capital flow and trade flows, something that is simply not allowed under the current structure and for which no institutional means are available. Instead, the country must be looted and labor must see wages and public services ground down, the democratically elected government helpless.

If Britain or Switzerland wants to manage immigration, there should be reasonable means instituted to permit that, in my view.

I’ve read and re-read both the OP and the comments.

What strikes me most is the utter lack of charity expressed towards those in the Leave camp because, according to the OP, nearly all the Leave supporters themselves ‘must’ all be so lacking in charity themselves as to be fairly judged racist.

The possibility of an awareness of others is simply denied to half the British populace in a strange world where competing concerns suddenly no longer not exist.

@69 Sebastian H seems very sensible.

Finally, shouldn’t we all be able to think what we like? I mean, in theory, at least.

Just to be clear, we cross posted. My comment immediately after yours (currently 91) was not a response to your comment (currently 90).

My response to 90 is:
Yes we shouldn’t over-homogenize, but you should be aware that you took a very homogenizing approach in your OP (nearly all, etc.).

“as if I and others bought into the whole so-called “neoliberal” programme and didn’t in fact vote for something much more redistributive to the extent to which it was on offer.”

I’m aware of that completely. But we weren’t willing to sacrifice any of the globalization project until we sorted it out. That was probably fine in 1973, less fine in 1983, much less fine in 1993 and so on. As it became more and more clear that the gains weren’t helping the losers enough it became less and less defensible to keep going forward before dealing with that fact. The EU project specifically has been moving for more EU power and money to the winners without ever dealing with what was happening to everyone else.

From their perspective, they have already been very community-oriented about this. They have paid the sacrifices repeatedly, and frankly been treated like crap for decades. You’re right that the sense of community has been broken but come off as clueless about how much our side has done to break it.

@Manta 59

About the ethimology of the term “Terrone”, after a short search on the italian Wikipedia and some website about ethimology (in italian) I get this story for the ethimology:

1) the word “terrone” is first attested in a manuscript of the 17th century with the meaning of “big landlord”;
2) the term later become associated to land laborer, not land owners;
3) at a minimun in the postwar period the word came to mean southern italians, with clear derogative undertones.

No site that I found states clearly when the change of meaning happened, so I think that the english version of wikipedia oversimplify the story (note that the word can be a politicized one in Italy). When applied to southeners, it clearly already had derogative meaning.

MisterMr@96, my apologies for not being clear: I fully agree with your point that “the word came to mean southern italians, with clear derogative undertones”.

My disagreement was about the etymology: but of you think the English Wikipedia got it wrong (and, as it seems, you can back that claim), then please do edit it!

One of the problems of the OP is the referendum campaign wasn’t conducted as a choice between cosmopolitanism and racism, or international solidarity versus ‘looking after your own’. They are just motivations that people have read into the various choices made by the electorate.

What the voters were offered was a clash between one side that claimed that a leave vote would turn the UK into a third world country, and another that essentially claimed that the UK already was a third world country, but leaving the EU would make it the world’s richest. Some people also made some slightly racist claims. Many leading politicians (from the Tories and Labour) campaigned for remain despite showing virtually no enthusiasm for the EU or internationalism through their political careers, and indeed making it a scapegoat for their own failings when it was politically convenient. Other politicians had no real record of public Euroscepticism, but supported leave when they thought it was expedient for their careers.

When the politicians, media and business establishment were so utterly cynical and opportunistic about the whole exercise, it is not surprising that the result came as it did. Given the lack of solidarity in British public, social, economic, and I dare say private life, to single out one particular instance of rather selfish, short-sighted behaviour and to call it racist seems a little over the top and somewhat short-sighted itself. If the referendum campaign, and general political discourse on the EU, had taken the form of internationalist principle and human solidarity against fratricidal excess and petty hatred then the OP might be fair. But unfortunately it didn’t, and it isn’t.

@86 Bruce Wilder
Excellent and incisive comment. I agree with almost every word. It makes me realise how much there is in common between the left-ish sentiments to which you subscribe and my own more or less liberal rightwing sentiments.

bruce wilder @101,
my impression is that, at least in the last 10 years, whenever it could the EU has been pushing for the dismantling of the social state.

@105/Will
How quaintly tribal of you, LOL!

OT, but FYI:

http://www.frenchtoday.com/blog/dont-say-mon-plaisir

BW: “I want the state to be democratically controlled but powerful, powerful enough to act in the public interest.”

Your criticism seems to be that the EU is a laissez-faire regime. And yet one of the most potent anti-EU “arguments” is that the EU regulates too much. Too many directives, too heavy regulatory burdens on business, too much consumer protection, protection of privacy, protection of the environment, labor protection (you remember, that’s why Britain needed all those opt-outs and special deals). The latest howler that I have recently read about is that the EU soon requires oven mitts to be tested for heat resistance. For the anti-EU crowd, it’s outrageous.

I’m not too sure that your reading of the EU debate is even close to reality.

Is Chris Bertram urging me to believe that, no matter what they themselves think they are about, “nearly all Brexiteers” are ‘objectively’ racist and xenophobic? If so, it’s disturbing to see that charges of the “social fascism” sort are being resurrected and reapplied.

The four freedoms of the EU aren’t really inherently laissez-faire. Even a fully socialist economy could in principle satisfy them: as long as goods, services, labor, and capital can freely move around, who controls the means of production is a separate question. The problem is that as long as long as we have a basically capitalist society, capital mobility and trade gives capital owners increased leverage over governments since they can take their capital and leave and keep on doing business. But that’s not absolute leverage. With the United States all the four freedoms are internally satisfied but some states do in fact have more regulations and more of a welfare state than others, and to the extent that the United States is overall a pretty neoliberal country, the dormant commerce clause isn’t really the first reason people would generally pick for why that is.

Chris Bertram says that it’s OK to take yourself out of community with a group of people because of something they do, including political stances they adopt. Didn’t British Labour recently participate in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Or is that all water under the bridge now that Blair is gone?

This rejection of racists trope does kind of ignore what Lupita keeps trying to point out, which is that this is really one group of killers rejecting another. I think that other people are justified in regarding the whole process as a kind of hand-washing fetish rather than anything serious.

@OP (haven’t read the comments, so repetitions are likely)

>A national political project requires people to think of themselves as being in some sense in community with their co-nationals and to recognize themselves as being under special obligations to those others, obligations that they don’t have to outsiders. But I now feel myself out of community with my co-nationals who voted differently. … One reason for this is that I think of nearly all of them as racists and xenophobes.

They pay taxes in the same country as you do. If you need healthcare, education, police protection, military defence etc., you will get it from a system that they have contributed to and are participating in, just like they’ll get it from a system that you have contributed to and are participating in (each according to their income, according to fiscal legislation that you and they together have participated in dertermining). They also allow you to participate in the making of collective decisions – such as the Brexit vote – just as you allow them to do so, and that on an equal basis. *These* are the special obligations that make you all a national community. Holding political views that you find agreeable, on the other hand, is *not* a requirement for someone to qualify as your fellow citizen.

>I’d say that such indifference to the fate of some particular group is a form of prejudice against that group, a failure to show those people respect, a failure to take proper account of their interests.

Most of what you mention, especially the legal uncertainty and trouble, is a consequence of any secession, so by this logic every secession is xenophobic. In general every decision has positive and negative effects, and these are often distributed unequally within the population. A nation has the right to make decisions even when they impact negatively some part of its population, if the positive effects are deemed to outweigh that. Such a decision is not necessarily discriminatory or reflective of a belief in a lower inherent value of the humans suffering the negative effects. I understand that your assessment was that the negative effects in this case, assuming a non-discriminatory weighting of interests, were *not* outweighed by the positive ones. This assessment may well have been correct (FWIW, I did and still do have the impression that it was), but I don’t think it was also so *obviously* correct that everyone having a different assessment of the consequences automatically had to be a xenophobe in any sense of the word.

@118 F Foundling
“… I understand that your assessment was that the negative effects in this case, assuming a non-discriminatory weighting of interests, were *not* outweighed by the positive ones. This assessment may well have been correct (FWIW, I did and still do have the impression that it was) …”

The bit in parentheses is the only thing in your entire comment I disagree with. Exceedingly well said.

@Manta 98

Yeah, sorry, I too was nitpicking about the etimology. I can’t edit the english wikipedia because my main source is wikipedia in another language, that isn’t considered a good source enough for wikipedia editing standard.

UserGoogol @ 114

I really have no idea what you are talking about.

“I don’t think that those you describe are failures of the institutions.
Put it simply: different countries have very different interests, and the interests of the stronger countries prevail.”

If the interests of the strong countries prevail so much that it damages the ability of the institution to survive, that is pretty much the definition of an institutional failure. Now I’m not going to make a strong empirical claim that such is actually definitely happening, but that would definitely be an institutional failure.

The problem with Chris’s method in this post is that it proves way too much while either draining ‘racist’ of useful meaning or charging up much lesser sins and confusions with the valence of racism.

It is closely analogous to the “objective Saddam supporter” arguments which were so deftly taken apart here many years ago.

Is he willing to accept the charge of being objectively anti-low-wage-UK-worker because of voting for and supporting institutions willing to prioritize globalization before (never) dealing with the dislocations? No he is not. And that is fine, because he really did want other things to happen, and in the small ways he could he tried to make them happen. But in fact it was entirely obvious by any year in the 2000s that a vote for greater EU power was a vote for increased globalization under the kind of system that treats Greece the way the EU does. And that goes double for any year after the big recession. But the neo-liberals who are very much in charge of the EU banking systems are far more powerful and at least as numerous as the actual racists that he wants to tie around 50% of the voting public.

I mention that not because I think he should be damned for the neo-liberal actions, but because it reveals a pretty inequity in the treatment of politics he likes vs. politics he doesn’t like in terms of what counts when bad outcomes happen.

Racism is a real phenomenon but it isn’t particularly useful here because it over-explains. Why is 50% of the electorate suddenly racist when they weren’t before? If they were racist before, what has changed to make them harder to work with than before? “They are racist” (even if it were totally true) doesn’t help you understand what has happened or why. It isn’t explanatory.

But as it happens I don’t think it is particularly descriptive of what happened with the Brexit vote. It was quite literally a vote to leave the EU for reasons having to do with the way that the EU has interacted with the people who voted against it. Part of that definitely involved foreigners coming in to work. But I tend to think that if the economy was actually doing well for the whole country, and if the lower class weren’t being thrown out of London, that it wouldn’t have hit such resistance. If everyone were doing well and they still hated foreigners coming in, that would be classic racism. But it isn’t that they thought Poles were fine and Italians not fine. It was that the open borders for work were causing serious dislocations, no matter what the race of the worker. THAT is a classic jobs concern. It may very well be that for economic efficiency we as nations learn to live with that. But we shouldn’t pretend that good ‘on average’ is good for everyone. If we do that to too many people without sharing the ‘on average’ wealth, those people decide that they don’t need to vote for the ‘on average’ good policies.

A big part of this is elite failure. For 30 years we have been telling them that the economic processes of the EU are good for the member countries. We’ve been able to illustrate that with rising GDP. But for those who don’t share in the rising GDP, the whole explanation begins looking like a lie. They haven’t experienced this “successful UK”. They’ve experienced stagnant wages with skyrocketing housing costs. They’ve experienced job loss without ever getting back to replacement level income. So when they are faced with “leaving will hurt the GDP” their response is “your story about the GDP for the last 30 years doesn’t match my experience, why should I listen to you?”

It isn’t so much that they are economically ignorant, as it is that you are talking about essentially two different economies.

Summing all of that up as ‘racism’ is easy and understandable, because a lot of the economic dislocation discussion ends up as venting about migrant workers. But it misses a huge part of the actual dynamic.

Sebastian what has changed is that there was a referendum – there wasn’t before. This referendum came about because a large part of the Tory party are anti eu, and they have slowly been emboldened over time by the growing popularity and influence of UKIP. Rather than suddenly becoming racist, the country has had 20 years of UKIP snapping at Tory heels from the right, and finally this brought about the generational change needed to tip Tory policy, made possible by an incompetent and reckless leader who doesn’t understand anything about anything. This moment had been coming for years, it was just a matter of the right confluence of stupidity and cynicism. Just as trump has been waiting to happen, just waiting for the right confluence of swamp fever and stupidity.

so the question “why are they suddenly racist now” is an empty question. They’ve been clearly and publicly racist for the past 20 years – didn’t you notice?

“I’ve never been indifferent to the effects of policy on poor communities in the UK and have consistently voted for parties that proclaim they will do something about poverty and disadvantage.”

Are we talking about the Labour Party? They proclaim, but for the most part they have prioritized the globalization side rather than the deal with the ill effects of globalization side. They have pushed through the globalization portions and not pushed through the mitigation portions. And that was absolutely knowable by the 2001 election and certainly the 2005 election. Unless you were voting for some no hope party which I suppose is a completely different issue.

So you were voting, given the options presented to you, not “actively hostile” to those left behind by globalization, but not friendly enough to slow down the globalization regime one tiny bit before dealing with the mitigation side. Voting for governments that repeatedly chose not to deal with mitigation before globalization (and frankly to barely deal with mitigation at all).

So Labour isn’t on their side, and the Tories weren’t on their side, and they are screwed. They feel hostile and out of community with the cosmopolitans because they have been forced to bear the sacrifices for the good of the country, without being part of the rewards. They face stagnant wages and hugely skyrocketing housing costs. They feel that way at a minimum since the early 2000s if not earlier.

Finally, after at least 15 years of being completely sidelined, they are presented with the possibility of clearly voting on the issue that has been bothering them. They aren’t given the best choice–they can’t get “Remain with a slow-down of the ever increasing union and lots of mitigation so we don’t have to keep sacrificing so London can get more money”. They get “Remain or Leave”. The EU doesn’t signal that mitigation is on the way or will be easily dealt with. The EU signals a pretty clear screw you to that idea through the handling of Italy and Greece as well as hints about Spain.

So with those choices they choose “Leave”.

You are justifiably shocked that so many people felt that way. Justifiably because you have been insulated from those people. You feel that they aren’t part of the same community as you because they didn’t think ‘enough’ about foreign workers, or about how the more globalized workers would be impacted. They didn’t think enough about people like you, because they were thinking more about people like them.

You interpret that as ‘racist’. But they are just as mad at people like you as they are at the Polish worker. Maybe more mad at people like you because they feel that you should have been looking out for them in ways that the Polish worker didn’t need to.

The break in the community that you are feeling now is the break they have been feeling for at least 15 years.

Making it “nearly all brexiteers are racists” is an easy way to make the break all their fault. But it isn’t. The break is our fault as well because we who reaped the huge benefits of globalization never made keeping them in the community a priority. Sure we wanted them to do better, *but never enough to sacrifice any of the things that we wanted*. The sacrifices were always left to them with very few of the rewards.

Now did a bunch of nasty politicians seize the opportunity to enflame this situation with racism? Absolutely. But the whole point of the technocratic elite is that they are supposed to keep things running well enough that such things won’t take hold. And there is the failure I’m trying to get us to face.

Richard craven, housing policy can be changed to handle growing numbers of people from Europe, but it wasn’t and the option was never put on the table for the leave voters because the party in power doesn’t care about the poor or the homeless. Voting for a choice to expel the foreigners to clear up housing, rather than voting to keep the foreigners here and try to fix the housing problem some other way, is a choice – a choice to expel people of a certain race because you want their houses.

Also, this may come as a surprise to you, but homelessness is not a new issue in the uk that just sprung up due to all those nasty foreigners. It was a big problem immediately after the 2008 crisis, when there were probably less foreigners, and it was a vastly bigger problem in the 1990s at the end of the last Tory reign, before free movement was implemented. And do you know who the daily mail was blaming then? Foreigners. In that case, gypsies and “illegal asylum seekers”. It’s shocking I know, but housing has been a problem in the uk since the 19th century, the people in the worst housing were always foreigners , and the people to blame for homelessness wee always foreigners. So when people tell me they have just noticed this problem and its recent noticeability must be the fault of this new wave of foreigners, you’ll have to forgive me for being a little skeptical. The real problem with housing for the past 100 years has been a lack of supply and a lack of investment (private and public). That problem has affected foreigners the most and ha existed regardless of britains immigration policy.

And yet, just as in the case of “the poles are pushing down salaries” it’s not the people paying the low salaries or the slum lords who are to blame, but the poles. You need to think about your political framework if you’re consistently Fallon for this bait and switch.

(None of the following is personalised towards CB, but speaking more generally)
I don’t think it works because I do think a component of active hatred is necessary for racism. Prioritising your group (which we all do, see BLM for example) or wanting to live with people who are culturally similar to you does not make you a racist, imo. This is even before with get to the many reasons people voted out, a lot of which aren’t overly relevant to xenophobia.
I think there’s often a hypocrisy with the left (regardless of race). They often talk about the benefits of multiculturalism, but still segregate on race, class, values etc. The upwardly mobile working class black moving out of their old neighbourhood to live among people who better match their intellectual and new class interests, the white person moving out of the east end as it becomes “more foreign”, the middle class person living in superficially diverse areas but still socialising along class, racial, ideological lines are all engaging in the same process imo. I don’t think any are doing anything particularly untoward.

“I’d say that such indifference to the fate of some particular group is a form of prejudice against that group, a failure to show those people respect”

This seems to me to be arguing backwards from your conclusions. They are indifferent because they voted out, therefore their indifference shows they are prejudiced. I don’t know how this claim can be substantiated in any meaningful way, or how “indifference to the fate of some particular group” can tell us anything useful, being a pretty much universal human failing.

Ronan, BLM aren’t prioritizing a particular group. The police prioritize black people for death, and BLM is responding to that. Jesus this stuff is so basic how can people here be getting it so wrong?

Richard did you not consider alternatives like voting for more housing? Because unless something else changed radically you will not see any reduction in homelessness after the Europeans stop coming, and it will still be blamed on foreigners. Also, given that immediately after the vote may and others refused to guarantee the status of Europeans in the uk, and given that UKIP was very open about wanting to drive out foreigners, why did you vote leave assuming they would enact a policy they never indicated they agreed to? Could it be that you didn’t really care if UKIP got their way after the leave campaign won? Or did you not understand just how bad these people’s views are? Had you not noticed the UKIP advertising promising to force people out? How did you interpret their claims that brexit would immediately reduce overcrowding? Some magic wand? Or a specific policy to reduce the population size? What did you think that policy would be?

Richard, homelessness in the uk has been falling since 2003.

It think that for Lexiteers and sovereignists there were many consequences that they didn’t consider and it wasn’t just the impact on EU citizens in the UK e.g. hand waving about access to the single market or the effect on UK citizens in EU countries. I keep thinking about Sunderland which voted leave apparently against its own self-interest with uncertainty over the future of a major employer in Nissan and loss of fiscal transfers. Maybe they saw whatever principle they were voting on as more important than the cost they would personally bare although they may have misjudged what this cost would be.

It is also possible that they misjudged what the cost to EU citizens would be. The leave campaign kept stating that nothing would change for people already in the UK. However they never stated that EU citizens have their legal right to remain in the UK based on EU treaties which would no longer apply after Brexit. Therefore a mechanism would need to be found to maintain people’s legal status and there will be uncertainty while this is being debated. Personally I think there will be a reciprocal agreement that works well for UK citizens in other EU countries and for EU citizens in the UK but there is no guarantee of this. I also think that people who have little or no contact with the UK immigration system do not understand how restrictive and controlled it is, instead they get the impression that we have uncontrolled immigration. In part this is to do with successive governments casting immigration as a problem so that they can then be seen to be taking action on it. Obviously this could be seen as pandering to racist voters but on the other hand it could be seen as manipulation of voters. Since neither of the two main parties have had an open and honest debate about immigration it is unsurprising that people were not fully aware of the potential effect of Brexit on EU immigrants. I am not sure if the problem is that most leave voters were racist or that an anti-racist view of immigration failed to be presented sufficiently to leave voters.

@144/Faustusnotes

What your link show is that homelessness fell between 2003 and 2010. It’s 2016 now.

Richard, do you have any other objective evidence that the problem is worse than be fro or purely your experience of a run in Bristol? Lots of cities in Asia manage to grow and add housing without problems. Consider Tokyo, which manages to find affordable housing for 34 million . Kicking out foreigners because you can’t envisage an infrastructure policy is a racist policy, or racism has no meaning. And please note that “this policy is racist” and “you are racist” are different things, and “you are racist” and “you are evil” are also different things. Although I have to confess I can’t think too highly of someone who prefers to kickb5 million people out of their jobs and homes rather than build 5 million new homes. Why not build those homes, schools and clinics?

@144

What about housing affordability? Has that also been falling since 2003.

Is someone on £13,000 a year, who won’t ever be able to save a deposit, racist simply because you say they’re racist?

So cut and dry.

The UK joined the EEC on 1st January 1973 and thus accepted free movement of people. This decision was cemented by the referendum just over two years later.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Conservative Party and the conservative press were firmly in favour of the EEC and, with the signing of the Single European Act, took the first steps to political union. The Conservative Party under Thatcher and Major was firmly in favour of the extension of the EEC (and then EU) to southern Europe and then to eastern Europe – a widening of Europe rather than a deepening of Europe.

The Labour Party was more Euro-sceptic but was continually criticised by the press and Conservative Party for this; eventually in the late 1980s the Labour Party came to terms with Europe and abandoned Euro-scepticism. Shortly afterwards a right-wing Euro-scepticism emerged, of which Boris Johnson’s exaggerated newspaper reports from Brussels were one of the first manifestations. Gradually, newspapers that had attacked the Labour Party for not being enthusiastic about Europe started being critical of Europe themselves.

Meanwhile the UK went through a process of rapid de-industrialisation; the economy became dependent on a financial services industry that is concentrated in London and the south-east of London. Former industrial areas had to try to regenerate themselves, ironically supported by EU funds. The population of London began to grow again for the first time since 1939. The government that engineered the change in the economy from industry to finance also abolished the strategic planning authority for London, so only when the GLA was created in 2001 did real planning for the previous 15 years of population growth begin. At that point local authorities were still trying to make their budgets work by selling school buildings to be turned into flats while trying not to notice that their school enrolment figures were rising significantly.

The Euro-sceptic narrative that took hold in the right-wing media in the 1990s, and on which the Leave campaign built, knits together diverse issues in a sometimes illogical way. It has convinced certain sections of the population that the challenges that the UK faces are due to decisions taken by foreigners rather than decisions taken in the UK. There is a pressure on London’s infrastructure because of decisions taken in the UK to change the economy of the UK, relying on financial services and the supporting services that demand a flexible workforce while neglecting the infrastructure of London for almost 20 years. Few people see this because a thick smokescreen narrative has been created about the EU and immigration.

Meanwhile the UK has voted for Brexit, the pound has slumped but that could be good for exports: if the UK still had any manufacturing industry that could export its products.

Citing a nation that accepts virtually no refugees, monitors the activities of all non-nationals, and actively profiles all Muslims, native and non-native might not be an ideal model for how to address the challenge of welcoming strangers.

If Britain had Japan’s immigration and housing policy, most here would shriek Faustusnote probably the loudest. Public housing in Japan is markedly different from that in most nations, and is available to practically everyone in Tokyo precisely because Japanese people believe very strongly in preferential rights going to nationals.

There are many reasons why income inequality in Japan is among the lowest in the world. However, within Japan there is a great deal of regional inequality and that inequality extends to different regions within Kanto. Property values within Kanto vary a great deal. The population of Tokyo proper is about 13 million.

Hysterical – citing one of the most anti-immigrant nations on the planet as the model for how to treat 5 million non-nationals entering the UK.

On a more serious note, I suspect a great many Leave voters are a/not racist and b/will not be at all happy to learn that Teresa May is open to using 3 million EU citizens living in Britain as ‘bargaining chips.’

Another good reason for people who take the well-being of others seriously to sit in a corner and sulk.

Ronan 141: “Not prioritising your group would be having a more general opposition to police violence, not a group focused one.”

I don’t think that’s a fair criticism of BLM at all. They don’t want to distribute police violence more equally, they want it to stop.

@156 Kidneystones

Exactly. Well said.

@161
“But feeling part of the political community isn’t compulsory, and one can feel a degree of alienated to a point where you say “this isn’t me, I have no commitment to going forward on fair terms with these people.”
But Chris, your political outlook is decidedly – how shall I put this? – niche. I imagine that a certain amount of alienation goes with the territory.

white voter in the US who isn’t actively hostile to black people but who simply doesn’t care about the lives African Americans often have to live and the dangers they are exposed to and who votes for policies that make those lives worse (backing the carceral state, for example) can justly be accused of racism on the grounds of their indifference to those impacts.

Here you may be confusing ‘justly’ and ‘successfully’.

If English had 200, or perhaps 400, words, then it would be necessary to use ‘racist’ for all of hatred, bias, negligence, indifference, ignorance and simple mistakes, on any topic related to any kind of large-scale grouping of people. It doesn’t, so using that word is a choice. This is a political topic, so it is a political choice.

US PoC (by and large) get to vote, UK Poles don’t. One of those facts caused Brexit, and the other will presumably cause Trump to lose. So in the US, using the word that way has a history of being a successful political choice. It’s hardly a coincidence you reached for there to find an example.

In the UK, it is the deliberate, or unconsidered, choosing of a non-viable political strategy. Which in my personal concept map sits at the dead center of the region labelled ‘evil’; Brexit is hardly high on the scale of awfulness such things have lead to.

this is isn’t me, I have no commitment to going forward on fair terms with these people. I’ll pay my taxes and obey the law for prudential reasons so long as I’m here

My impression is this is more-or-less how most British people (certainly from centre-right outwards, cf. Thatcher on society) feel anyway. Nailing your colours to their anomic individualist mast probably isn’t going to make many of them bat an eyelid imho (not suggesting you necessarily intended to…)

That’s an interesting way of putting it, Chris, and seems fair enough to me.

CB: “they have no commitment to making the world a better place, I’m increasing my cosmopolitan commitment at the expense of my commitment to my fellow-Englanders, not looking out for #1.”

How exactly are you not looking out for #1? This may be a tu quoque, but you’re using it as an apparently serious argument against an entire group of people.

You’re increasing a “cosmopolitan commitment” that favors the exact interests of the professional class of which you are a member. If you don’t want to read a more radical critique, try Thomas Frank’s _Listen, Liberal_ for a description of how this works in a U.S. context. Politics for what he calls the 10% is better than politics for the 1%, I suppose.

P.S. To Chris Bertram
British ex-pats in Europe are just as affected as European ex-pats in Britain.

It was more an answer to Faustusnote tiresome bullshitting, like “”is it racist to take away the right to work if 5 million people on the basis of their race”?

Also eu citizens resident in the uk for five years are likely a minority. If article 50 is ever actually triggered it will be soon and the majority of the residents at risk will be 1-5 year residents. Any attempt to normalize these people by the Tories is going to be political suicide – something our “non racist” brexiters on this thread no doubt don’t believe and can’t understand because they don’t know why people voted leave – so those 1-4 year residents will have to go. Leaving britains care, construction, health and food services industries deeply screwed.

At which point I predict “leftists” like rich will blame cosmopolitan leftists for not being radical enough, and completely miss the political facts that made this disaster happen.

That’s not bullshitting manta it’s a question. Do you have an answer? Do you concede that if those 5 million are kicked out, your vote was racist? Or does the word have no meaning at all anymore?

faustusnotes, when will you stop stealing money from your employer? That is also a question.

Chris Bertram @175
Because you don’t mention it at all, and it suggests that simple lack of thought is a lot of the problem.

But a question for you – would your argument still hold if Britain had never joined the EU and the referendum was about joining. To me the referendum is like treating a divorce with children as being the same as two never-marrieds thinking about splitting up.

It’s useful to recall at all times that a minority of people in just about every community harbor some deeply rooted and extremely hostile views about their ‘peers.’

Reality provides numerous opportunities to ‘justify’ these views.

Most A are evil and/or racist is a staple for some. Our intellectual and moral superiors argue that we’re not likely to make progress on any issue until we accept this basis ‘fact.’

As I mentioned before, I think we’re all entitled to hold whatever beliefs and opinions we like. So, I’m entirely supportive of their views, but I preserve to develop and hold my own;

I hope that’s ok.

Oh manta! It was very clear that many in the leave camp wanted to see the end of residency rights for existing nationals. UKIP general election policy was to end access to all social welfare services (including the nhs) for people resident less than five years – effectively a strategy to force them to leave, but you wouldn’t believe that would you? It’s a matter of fact that leaving the EU means these foreign residents have to be granted a new residence status, and there was no promise in the referendum that there residence was safe. Theresa May refused to guarantee their right to stay, as did other candidates for the Tory leadership. Of course if you ignore the actual effects of policy and pretend it’s okay for people to vote on something like this without any regard for what the policy will be you can try and pretend that the policy was not racost, but the reality is that those 5 million EU citizens have no guarantee of a right to stay.

Furthermore, I can assure you – because I am familiar with this culture and you are clearly not – that whatever the “leftist” defenders of racism in this thread may pretend to believe, the people who voted leave understood the dog whistles, and they believed that these people would be kicked out. You can guarantee that they will vote UKIP if that assumption is not met and you can guarantee the Tory leadership know that. I’m really sorry that you don’t understand British culture and don’t understand how racist dog whistle politics work but in modern England that’s not an excuse – if you want to make any claim To being politically savvy you need to understand the daily mail, UKIP, the Tory working class and the yearning for empire. That means understanding bojo’s dog whistles and why UKIP have had so much influence over the art 20 years.

The people who voted leave are expecting a purge. Don’t think they care about the pensioners in Spain either (in any case those pensioners don’t want to return to the hk because it has too many immigrants). They want rid of the foreigners, and that’s what they will get. You can pretend this isn’t true, but you’re living in a fantasy world if you do.

Again, are we talking about what will (probably) happen , or what you and your neighbours thought would happen?

In the first case, see the link @173.
In the second case, I am not particularly interested in it.

You can build a theory based on not getting it if you want manta. Get back to me in two years and we can discuss how wrong you were.

@T

Not to defend London or the Anglo-American Banks centered in London, but has not the imposition of austerity on Southern Eurozone, and Greece in particular, been chiefly a German thing, a lot of bad German thinking about an event that occurred 90 years ago and which is misinterpreted to this days. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/26/europe-doesnt-work-for-germany-either-as-schubles-faux-pas-demon/

Kidneystones@156
Stop making arguments based on you’re personal knowledge of living in Japan. Your arguments must be based on watching TV, opinion polls, and blogs. And no nuance. Carry on. :)

I wish I could muster more sympathy for the OP’s position but I just can’t.

We can’t dispute that some voters chose Brexit out of a dislike or even hatred of foreigners. This is a racist reason. I am sure that some also voted out for reasons of national sovereignty, economic deprivation or control of immigration policy. These are non-racist reasons.

The reason the OP feels out of step with his national community isn’t because of voter racism. I suspect that even if 99% of Brexiters had done so because of non-racist reasons, he would still feel the same sense of dislocation. He isn’t unhappy with their reasons but the result itself.

If I could give some modest advice to the OP (as a foreigner living in England), it would be that this cosmopolitan society he is looking to commit to does not exist anywhere in the world. How could it when there is so much inequality and uncertainty in the modern world? I’ve had the fortune of living on 3 different continents and frankly there are rude and polite people everywhere. Britain is one of the least racist countries I’ve lived in. The cosmopolitan attitudes he identifies with is a minority of society found in many countries (I hesitate to use the word “elite”) and a product of good fortune, family, education and temperament. I’ve no doubt that such attitudes are admirable, but for now, I’d encourage you to accept the reality you live in and fight for a better one.

I’m increasing my cosmopolitan commitment at the expense of my commitment to my fellow-Englanders, not looking out for #1.

Happy to acknowledge you’re not acting out of individual self-interest. So as I understand, you are proposing to mentally sever all ties of fellow feeling with the co-members of the political community of which you are, as a matter of fact, as voter, tax-payer, neighbour, user of public services, etc, a member, in favour of a pan-European community that, unless I am mistaken, exists now and for the foreseeable future in your imagination. Could you give us any idea of the concrete consequences of this act of defiance?

Chris :”We have many towns and cities that have shrunk over the years, some to half of their peak population. In many of those towns and cities there are streets full of empty houses. Oddly, they are often in regions of the country that favoured Leave. Places with lots of EU immigrants, such as London, tended to favour Remain.”

This strikes me as a very poor use of sort-of-statistics. How about:

We have many towns and cities that have had their ability to support work snatched from them, some by losing over 50% of the jobs. Unsurprisingly these regions of the country favoured Leave because they feel they have not done well under the EU.

Places able to enjoy the benefits of immigrant labor while pushing out unwanted countrymen through skyrocketing housing prices tended to favour Remain because they get to enjoy the benefits while pushing the costs on to the dislocated.

My version is problematic for all sorts of reasons, but it is much closer to the truth than yours.

“I’m increasing my cosmopolitan commitment at the expense of my commitment to my fellow-Englanders, not looking out for #1.”

Do you really feel you are making a sacrifice with that in the sense of giving up something important to you for something more important? What specific things are you going to sacrifice? Is this new loss of commitment to your fellow-Englanders going to cause some radical change in your voting patterns? If not, isn’t it just possible that you already made the break, but didn’t really notice it the costs of the sacrifices was being borne by people for whom you “failed to give them the thought they should have”?

#204 So what your mental repudiation of your British national identity means in practical terms is that instead of supporting Labour you’ll now be supporting various international environmental and social justice campaigns? Not exactly the Boston Tea Party then (and I did have a vague memory you were doing that before June anyway…)

@205 Faustusnotes
“If you don’t understand this culture you can’t understand Chris’s complaints. Most of the responses to Chris are incredibly shallow and mean spirited because they refuse to accept the racist element of the vote. Until they do, frankly they have no idea and nothing sensible to add on the topic.”

Since “Almost all Brexiteers are racist” is the propositional core of Bertram’s article, your proposal amounts to the demand that Brexiteers connive in begging the question against themselves. Logic fail.

Sebastian, you are just wrong: the reason for the dismal state of UK society are neither the EU nor immigrants but the increasingly extreme policies of successive British governments. Denmark, Sweden and Finland are also EU members and have immigrants, duh.

I’m not sympathetic to the OP, but I have to add that many commenters seem to have constructed a bit of a mythical ‘typical’ leave voter in their head.

In a very secular country like the UK, nationalism is effectively the ‘opium of the people’. But you have to remember that while religion did provide some consolation for the poor and downtrodden, it also gave justification and a mission to the wealthy and powerful. There are as many affluent nationalists in Britain that voted leave as there are those from the disadvantaged. Many middle and upper-class leave voters have a strong sense of Empire nostalgia and a commitment to many socially authoritarian ’causes’ like hanging and flogging, deference to ‘betters’, homophobia and cultural conservatism. They share this with some working-class people, but have little else in common apart from a feeling that they have been ‘left behind’ by modern metropolitan society.

I think that many people from all social backgrounds that voted leave believed that the referendum was more of a chance to state their identity than it was to express their individual or collective interest. This is partly because they did not trust the political and economic establishment (they seem mistakenly to believe the media though), and because the same establishment had in fact spent 40 years doing very little to express any feelings of shared identity with Europeans, but had justified EU membership in the most narrow, grudging sense of economic necessity. Given this situation I was actually surprised that remain won as much of the vote as it did.

When people start to feel solidarity in the sense that Inspector Goole expressed then it might be a sign that the UK as well as the EU might actually start to work for its people:

“We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”

Sweden, Denmark and Finland are really not good examples of countries that haven’t seen a rise in malign nationalism.

I think Nk’s point may have been that unlike austerity Britain, Scando-capitalism looks after the left behinds, but that’s also looking a bit debatable, eg.

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/sweden—the-goodest-country-in-the-world—is-now-considering-a-ban-on-begging-2016-8/

Well, if Crooked Timber has its fair share of racists, xenophobes and misanthropic malcontents then why shouldn’t the Scandinavian countries?

But my point was that the socio-economic woes of the UK are largely homegrown and blaming foreigners/”the EU” is racist and/or xenophobic and definitely stupid.

By the author’s standard everyone is a racist. Almost every policy will have adverse consequences for some group and supporting it requires the sort of indifference you identify.

Anyone here long enough to put down deep roots can get British Citizenship. (So if they have been here for 3 years then will by the time of Brexit have been here for the requisite 5 years). So they will not have to leave.

Of those EU citizens who have now been here less than 3 years, it is highly unlikely that any who are in work will be told to leave at Brexit; and more likely than not that no one here on the day of the referendum will be asked to leave. So staying in the EU is *possibly* beneficial to *relatively recent* EU arrivals.

It is not unreasonable to think that *unlimited* immigration from the EU is to the detriment of many or most British people, as is the loss of sovereignty. (Whether this is correct can be disputed of course, but it is not obviously wrong or unreasonable or xenophobic to think it – see bottom of post. )

Thus the *possible* benefits to *recently arrived* EU citizens have to be balanced against the benefits to, and right to self-determination of, the British people. It is not unreasonable, racist or xenophobic to favour the latter. It is unreasonable to think that favouring the latter is racist or xenophobic.

(Surely it can be agreed that some immigrants benefit the British people and some do not. Having immigration control enables the UK to let in only those who do benefit the British people. The question is only where to draw the line.

When working out contributions and costs you have to look at the whole of the person’s life. So you have to factor in that each low income person does not pay enough tax to cover their share of state services even during their working life; they will then retire without owning their own home or having a large savings or pension, so are likely to cost two or three hundred thousand pounds in retirement. Do the maths: pensioner minimum income guarantee or state pension, housing benefit, other benefits, NHS, care home, the usual state services etc for the 20-25 years of retirement.

Then you have to also consider that when the labour force is expanding quickly this is likely to result in lower wages amongst those in competition for jobs. And that the economy has to expand more quickly than otherwise just to prevent unemployment increasing, and this is not conducive to increasing the proportion of highly productive and highly paid jobs.

And when the population is increasing swiftly then money has to be invested in building and extending housing, roads, hospital, schools etc leaving less to be spent on training, and on the less well off etc. )

This is a very manichaean comment thread. A Leave voter is either racist or isn’t. The win of Leave was either caused by the losers of globalization or wasn’t. EU immigration either has a noxious effect on the lives of the domestic population or hasn’t. We’re part of a community or aren’t. We have special ethical responsibilities to the members of our in-group compared to everyone else. This is just not how the world works for me.

Maybe it’s the long 90s era discussions about internalised homophobia that give me an unfair advantage here, but racism to me is something no one can just choose not to partake in. A member of the domestic population you can avail themselves of racism as a destructive tool — with or without consciously adopting racist (or xenophobic, or Islamophobic, or anti-Semitic [insert relevant manifestations, depending on the particulars of the situation]) attitudes. So to that extent I agree with Chris B.

But the degree to which this happens in a society isn’t just random, or just an emanation of individual traits. The failure of politics and policy to address long-standing festering issues (the immigration into Europe, for example, which has cost a lot of lives and at the same time created the hot potato of an unlawful migrant population is one of them) and, possibly worse, the feeling of alienation from a democratic process, the feeling of just being despised and lied to and being a subject rather than a citizen, however privileged in the greater scheme, will cause more people to take hold of the “racism” tool. More if there are snake oil sellers who fan those flames for their own interest; more if anti-racist talk and human rights ideas can be discredited (as “PC” or bleeding-heart liberal); and more if callousness towards one’s neighbour has already been made acceptable.

(I lived in the UK for 5 years — one of those EU migrants, with at first middling, later pretty good pay, for jobs that required having both certain technical skills and being fluent in two more European languages. I certainly considered myself part of the community — and was overall treated as such. I voted where I was allowed to. One of the reasons I didn’t develop much attachment to the UK was the extraordinary harshness that ordinary struggling people were exposed to in cultural terms. Unlike in France, I never actually got to become friends with any. Society is a lot less mixed in big-city England. The most emblematic thing was those ads run by the benefits office that encouraged people to turn in their neighbours for benefits fraud — necessarily on the flimsiest of suspicions, because how on earth should I know what benefits my neighbour, exactly, is receiving? Of the same ilk: ever rising university fees (and broken promises); school and education purely as a means to economic ladder-climbing; fit-to-work assessments; EMTs so overworked that they become cynical towards the vulnerable — the poor devils that, sure, aren’t the most easy to deal with, but are at the end of their ropes.

In none of the questions in the first paragraph I can come neatly down on one side at all. As far as people moving from one to the other, they are points on time lines that come with very different time scales. Sure, racism plays in a lot of this, but realistically a change of how someone perceives their identity (“oh, it seems that I’m a racist”) takes a long time, and many won’t ever get to this level of self-examination. Do we need them to? I hold it with Jay Smooth that in practical terms, getting people to understand that what they’re doing/saying is a racist *thing*, regardless of whether they are a racist *person* is much more promising (and faster to achieve).

Where to go from here? The only way I know of that works to stave off the widespread racist and xenophobic element for a while isn’t one that anyone would recommend: let them take over, kill 6 million undesirables and start a world war; then rub their noses in the mud; finally give them a hug and help them rebuild. Yeah, no. So what else? The consequence I’m drawing from the string of political “incidents” I’ve seen first-hand — from Le Pen, to UKIP and Brexit, to Alternative für Deutschland, to Trump — is to keep pushing for those reasonable, “good government” solutions that fix some of the problems. Working time and employment protections as well as renters’ protections could have made it much less desirable to employers to replace domestic employees with cheap, abusable short-term workers from Eastern Europe. Regional policies, outstanding educational policy, a dignified style of interacting with all citizens and residents. Personally, a scrupulous commitment to politeness and listening, however firm my argument. Also, whatever can be done to get people of different horizons to respectfully talk with each other.

I think it might be useful to talk about different sorts of racism, descriptively.

I don’t think all Brexiteers, for instance, would be racist in the sense that all of them would necessarily

A. verbally or physically attack people based on race,

or

B. they would subscribe to outdated pseudo-scientific ideas about people of non-white races being inferior.

I think that conclusion is reasonable due to the high numbers of people who voted for Brexit, and I don’t get the idea of this high number of people in the UK meeting A. or B. as I describe them above. I am not from the UK, so I could be wrong, but at least its not the idea I get.

But in a Trump thread I mentioned I thought that you would have to be racist in a way to support Trump due to his racist policies. Even if these policies were not the ones which drew you to supporting Trump, you are implicitly saying you would accept racist policies on the basis of getting whatever the policies Trump has which you do support.

This is a different form of racism than A. or B. as I outlined them above.

I’ll call it C. where you don’t count people of other races as important, or as belonging to your community in the same way people of your own race do.

Of course we all value our family and friends and people we are close to or know more, in some ways, than strangers. We buy them birthday presents, and visit them when they are sick, and so on.

But in a Nation, we don’t know everyone, we aren’t close to everyone.

A Nation is a larger community we belong to.

If we accept racist policies, we are in effect saying that we don’t think people of other races are important in our National community as much as people of our own race, or as important of the group of races we privilege over others.

This is a different sort of racism and probably more difficult to identify.

I grew up in a small town without much racial or cultural diversity. I remember when I first lived in the City I was on a tram one day and I found myself very surprised to hear Asian teenagers speaking with broad Australian accents. I had never thought to myself before this that I had a category in my mind of the sort of people who speak with broad Australian accents and Asians weren’t excluded from this, but the great surprise I felt in the tram that day showed me that I actually had that mental category.

I don’t think that was a particular sort of racism that would have affected anyone very negatively and I corrected it that day on the tram in my surprise, but it shows that you can mentally exclude groups from being in the community you belong to quite easily without giving it much thought.

If this sort of thinking proceeds to policy making or support for policies, I think it qualifies as a kind of racism.

And I think Chris Bertram is being fair to say the Brexit vote is an example of this.

Its a bit different in Australia because we don’t belong to anything like the European Union. I think we have preferential migration policies and things for New Zealand, since we are so close and similar. I am not sure about migration policies for Pacific Islands near Australia like New Zealand but not colonised by the UK.

The EU is sort of interesting since the countries retain Nation status, and don’t quite move to a Federation.

I think this does problematise what Chris Bertram is saying in a way — because we don’t only exclude people from our National community based on race, but also Nationality.

The EU seems to be a middling sort of thing, where all the countries are not part of one Nation like the federations such as Australia and the USA, but they give some rights of Nationality to people of other Nations in the EU.

While I would agree that excluding people based on racism is not acceptable, it is less clear to me that excluding people based on their current Nationality is not acceptable, while we retain Nations as the central bodies of governance and legal jurisdiction.

I think refugees are a different case, where they shouldn’t be excluded based on Nationality due to their status as refugees.

But I don’t really know what the answer is though in terms of the EU where you have Nations and commitment to extending the rights of citizenship to people of the other nations in the EU. I think this seems like a good goal really. But if people don’t want to belong to the EU it makes it very difficult, since I can see how its not that different to how in Australia we don’t extend the rights of citizenship to people apart from migrants to Australia who take up citizenship.

“I had a category in my mind of the sort of people who speak with broad Australian accents and Asians weren’t excluded from this, but the great surprise I felt in the tram that day showed me that I actually had that mental category.”

should be “I had a category in my mind of the sort of people who speak with broad Australian accents and Asians *were* excluded from this, but the great surprise I felt in the tram that day showed me that I actually had that mental category.”

Marc @143 “Hmm, if you think it’s okay, even laudable, to feel ‘out of community’ with the statitical average who voted Brexit because they’re ‘objectively’ racist, it’s hard to deny the validity of those who feel ‘out of community’ with, say, Muslims, because of their statistically averaged regressive attitudes toward liberal norms….”

Chris @148″ That’s true, and sometimes you say “ok, we lost, we’ll try to do better next time”. But feeling part of the political community isn’t compulsory, and one can feel a degree of alienated to a point where you say “this isn’t me, I have no commitment to going forward on fair terms with these people…”

But I don’t think this really answers Marc’s point. How is this qualitatively any different than the person who says they don’t feel any shared community with Muslims because of their statistically averaged regressive attitudes toward liberal norms? That they will do the legally obliged minimum to support them, but if they could get away from them they would?
The vast majority of the world’s political cultures and societies are more regressive (and I would say racist) than the UK, so how can you on the one hand (as a cosmopolitan) say you have no shared community or (moral, as opposed to legal) obligations to brexiters, yet you still have such a shared community and obligations to communities that are far more reactionary than north England pensioners?

John, as I mentioned above, nobody had any idea during the referendum campaign of what they were actually voting for, nobody expected Brexit to actually happen and nobody has any idea as to what to do now since nobody made any plans for the actual outcome.

All those rationalizing Brexit on this and the many other threads should consider this fact.

John, I found these inital responses to the referendum quite interesting:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

“Both of the major parties right? With both of the major parties focusing on different variations of globalization right? With neither of the major parties successfully implementing strong mitigation measures, right? I’m happy to admit that I don’t live in the UK so I could be wrong about that. Am I wrong about that?”

SebastianH: you’re not wrong. New Labour were a lot better at attempting mitigation measures, especially in the form of Sure Start and generally increased public funding, but still lacked any kind of effective regional policy or housebuilding policy. Their one great bit of regional policy was Scottish devolution.

I have sympathy for what Chris writes. I’m pretty sure he’s mistaken to think of nearly all Brexit-voters as racists. But he’s right to feel alienated from them, and to look elsewhere for his friends and his community. Foolish Brexit voters (I ignore the knaves) struck out at the wrong target and condemned us to a future, for as far as foreseeable, of asset-stripping low-wage homeless illiberal little Englishness. I mean even worse than what we faced otherwise. One feels this type of alienation every time the turkeys vote for Christmas at a general election. But after each Tory win one feels some hope that next time the vultures might yet be knocked off their perches for a few years, if only we can find the right leadership. This referendum is different. It has guaranteed an irreversible shift towards oligarchic-but-populist one-party rule in national politics – thereby weakening, not strengthening, our collective protection against the onslaught of global hyper-capitalism, not to mention the wars that it will in time yield. If you think it was bad to have French-owned water companies and German-owned rail franchises that leeched money out of the UK to help pay for better public services in their home countries, let’s see how you feel about their Russian- and Chinese-owned post-Brexit successors, with no public service aims at all.

The collective suicide note scribbled on 23 June 2016 causes informed people to doubt the sanity of continuing to throw their lot in with the turkeys. That is certainly how I feel. Like Chris, I wish them all a spiritual farewell, which I think is also irreversible. I never felt more Scots and I never felt more European. But I never felt less British. I now have too little in common with the inhabitants of rump-Britain. The idea that I should join them in trying to help make Brexit work, or indeed anything work, now just makes me laugh (and of course weep a little, for old time’s sake).

Even if you think I’m overreacting, my overreaction is still shared by many millions of reasonably educated people who are now, effectively, lost to the cause of progressive British politics (including my countryfolk in Scotland who will soon go it alone). This overnight busting of the longstanding illusion of solidarity is the last thing that the British left, and indeed the country, needed. It was an illusion always tenuously maintained, dangerously stretched by Blair, and finally destroyed in 24 hours of counterproductive lashing out at an unknown other. You win, Daily Mail.

The limited vision of those defending ‘remain’ on this thread is depressing. I voted remain and support the idea of European integration, but to invest membership of the EU in itself with such a high significance seems somewhat of an over-exaggeration. The roots of the ‘leave’ vote lie as much in the failings of the elites in the UK, the EU and other European countries as they do in the racism and xenophobia of sections of the British population.

The whole nature of these counsels of despair seems so utterly conservative in its political attitudes, and evidence of where the EU had been going wrong. Of course the referendum vote showed a lack of concern for EU nationals in the UK, the future of the single market and the UK’s economic fortunes. The electorate was offered the chance to vote once on the country’s status as an EU member and then leave everything else to the establishment to decide. That is the root of the problem, not the foolish caprices of the populace.

JQ@233: this thread started with racism and has now come to tribalism.

Can somebody please explain the difference between racism, nationalism, tribalism and classism?

@Rich Puchansky: You write as if disadvantaged and dispossessed people had nothing to gain from maintaining the illusion of solidarity with the urban intelligentsia. But they weren’t being screwed primarily by the urban intelligentsia, who are naive and hypocritical but not for the most part predatory. Nor were they being screwed primarily by the EU, which for all of its weaknesses has by and large helped to protect them against the even worse manifestations of globalization that they are liable soon to be exposed to. They were being screwed primarily by the Tories. If we were ever to build serious opposition to the Tories (and the even worse stuff that lies out on the UKIP right), there was no alternative to a vaguely leftish alliance based on an illusion. Generally, there is no other way in politics but illusion. That is why, over their 200-year history, the Tories have become such expert illusionists. And why they are the main beneficiaries, politically, of the abrupt end of the illusion of solidarity that once, all too briefly, sustained the British Labour Party.

It is, alas, rather characteristic of British progressives to think that illusions are something to be ashamed of, that they make politics less ‘healthy’, as you put it. Tell that to the people who now face the even less healthy future that I described, many of them at their own misguided behest. They were the patsies (I said ‘turkeys’) of more expert and cynical illusionists than the left can muster. And now that they have signed the warrants for their own permanent impoverishment and debilitation, I (and millions like me) are duly disillusioned about them. We can’t see much that still binds us together, when previously we deceived ourselves quite nicely that we could, and thereby kept some hope of social progress alive.

As a Remainer, I think that Professor Bertram is being unfair towards Brexiters, in that if his argument works (and I don’t buy that it does), it entails the existence of a large amount of racist Remainers. Let me explain.

Firstly, it appears that the argument takes a subjectivist line. Imagine a voter in a booth on the day of the referendum- he can either tick the box for “Leave” or for “Remain”. According to Prof. Bertram, it is not the act of ticking “Leave” in itself that makes the voter a racist. He allows that certain “Lexiteers” or “right wing sovereigntists” may tick “Leave” and not be racist. This is because of the internal thought process that led them to tick “Leave”. What is important, therefore, is not necessarily the voter’s behavior, but rather their internal decision-making process.

Why are the majority of Brexiters racist? Because, in making their decision, they did not give due consideration towards the disproportionate impact of Brexit on those ethnic minorities who are here because of the EU’s free movement laws. Lexiteers are exempt, because they did give due consideration, and thought that some other minorities’ interests outweighed that particular minorities’ interest. Leavers, for the most part, simply didn’t care. Fair enough.

However, what Prof. Bertram hasn’t considered, is that the majority of Remain voters also probably didn’t give the potential impact of BREXIT on ethnic minorities much thought. From the data we have on people’s reasoning for voting Remain, this consideration certainly wasn’t decisive. According to Lord Ashcroft Polls* the main reasons why people voted Remain were;

(a) the economic risks of leaving the EU being too great
(b) a perception that the correct balance had been struck between not having the Euro and yet having access to the single market and
(c) a feeling that leaving the EU would leave the UK “more isolated”

Because the racism or lack thereof of the referendum voter is determined by their internal reasoning prior to the vote, and not how they voted, then Prof. Bertram must come to the even more depressing conclusion that, not only are most Brexiters racist- so are most Remainers.

@248

“If we were ever to build serious opposition to the Tories (and the even worse stuff that lies out on the UKIP right), there was no alternative to a vaguely leftish alliance based on an illusion. Generally, there is no other way in politics but illusion.”

The politics of the Parliamentary Labour Party in a nutshell. Terrified of ‘the people’, they seek to manipulate them ‘for their own good’. Which also happens essentially to be the ‘own good’ of most of the middle and upper classes.

Casmilus that has been my point for the past 6 years…

Chris that’s a regional policy of sorts though isn’t it? The bigger problem is an absence of an industrial policy, without which a regional policy is just welfare. New labour had a kind of industrial policy but it was terrible (banking and housing). Clearly industrial policy is anathema to the Tories. Corbyn should be pushing for one but he’s too busy pulling stunts on trains I guess.

Over at my blog I have said repeatedly that it is the responsibility of the unions and labour to tackle racism amongst working and middle class people and to fight the tendency of working communities to react badly to new labour supply from outside. New labour failed dismally to take that on when they were riding high, and ran scared from it when luck ran out. I have a vague memory of some heated stoush we on here back when Gordon brown was running his “British jobs for British workers” spiel. I hope it’s obvious now why this was never the right approach for a party of labour …

Intelligentsia, really. On dit n’importe quoi.

JQ: Something of a tangent, but is there any informed discussion of what Brexit will actually mean.

Of course, no one knows what Brexit will mean, because it hasn’t happened yet: critical decisions have not been framed, let alone taken. And, what does happen will not be a simple Brexit affecting only the UK, but another revision of the EU as a whole, part of the EU’s continuing evolution.

Peter Dorman had a post worth considering, with promising links.
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/06/brexit-and-incorrigibility-of-eu.html

Given the anger at how well government has been working for most people, it seems whatever question was put before the people, where they were to have actual power to decide, would have failed for the powers that be. The unique thing here was people had a chance to say “Oxi” so they said it. What was the question?

Igor @252
If those premises were true, the only good thing that the Labor party could do is to dissolve itself and send its main representatives into oblivion.
Coincidentally, it seems that’s exactly what Labor politicians are trying to do now.

This reference to Lupita’s comment is me thinking that the language and categories of racism hide much that has shifted since they became mainstream. I’ve found Imogen Tyler and Barack Obama useful for thinking about this.

@reason I’m hardly going to mention every blindingly obvious point, am I? I assume you are American or something, because I doubt that any person in Europe could have been unaware that Brexit leaves British residents in Europe in a state of precarity. I have family members in this position, as it happens.

@ Chris Bertram – But your argument is that under an “equalities impact assessment” Brexit “will cause disproportionate harms” to EU citizens, and indifference to their fate is a form of prejudice – i.e racism or xenophobia. However, you never did any assessment. You just ignored Brit expats, and declared that EU migrants were hit the hardest. This is wrong. Let’s do an “equalities impact assessment”. What % of rEU citizens in the UK does this effect? 3.3 / ( 508 – 64.1 – 1.2 + 3.3 ) = 0.7%. And what % of Brits in the rEU? 1.2 / ( 64.1 + 1.2 – 3.3 ) = 2%. Brexit does not disproportionately effect foreigners, so your argument fails.

esebian@263
I’m interested to learn that “Racism” and “Nationalism” mean the same thing.
Query how that applies to Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Catalan, Quebequois nationalists.

Whether the assumption that there would be an end to free movement was unspoken, spoken, shouted or transmitted through telepathy, the only question the referendum asked was if Britain should remain a member of the EU. That was one of the main weaknesses of the whole process- we all found ourself wondering what really had been decided, because most of the issues are still unresolved.

The problem is that these issues are likely to fall within the almost exclusive jurisdiction of politicians and bureaucrats, who will jealously guard their decision-making responsibilities and shut out wider participation as much as they possibly can. On some of the individual concerns this might well seem to be a benefit, but from a broader point of view of democracy and mass politics it could end up being a disaster.

I thought this piece made the excellent point that complicity that arises from indifference can still be reasonably considered complicity, though on the other hand I think some of the commenters eloquently pointed out some of the dangers of wholesale labeling. But what do I know, I’m just a dumb yank, and mainly wanted to point out an odd, perhaps Brexit related, coincidence that reading this reminded me of. I was scanning the list of best movies of the current millennium so far, recently published in the Guardian and noted that I hadn’t seen Children of Men yet. I rented and watched it, and as I was watching kept having the erie feeling that someone that was cynically inclined might well want to retitle it It All Started With Brexit.

I think reason made a pertinent point, which was taken up by Ecrasez L’Infame.

Suppose you have a country Whackovia, which is 25% white and 75% black. The UK bans immigration from Whackovia. Is this best described as anti-black? or as anti-Whackovian? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like it’s anti-Whackovian.

That is, with Brexit bad things may happen to rEU nationals in the UK, but bad things may also happen to UK nationals in the rEU. Now maybe you say that the Brexit voter didn’t really mean it, but clearly they did; I can’t be the only one who noticed articles on panicky Brits now living in EU countries begging for a Remain result before the vote. The fact is, the Leave voters didn’t care.

So with all respect I find Chris’ argument a bit self-serving. He says the Leave voters were racists; he feels alienated by the vote; and voilà his feeling of alienation becomes a kind of nobility and moral rectitude. On the contrary I think the Leave voters were anti-cosmopolitans (or tribalists, bowing to JQ’s comment above). Sure they don’t like others living in the UK, but they also don’t like Brits living elsewhere. The common feature of the people they don’t like is: not having a strong claim to British national identity. Some are coming and some are going, but none are all the way in. So Chris is right to feel alienated, but his alienation is coming from the fact that Leavers voted not against the Poles but against *him*. Christ Bertram, cosmopolitan. And, for that matter, me, dax, also cosmopolitan. Let’s face it, but let’s face it honestly; a majority of the Brexit voters don’t like us. What’s more, there’s probably not a country on Earth where a majority of voters like us. We had two maybe three decades where it was glorious to be a world citizen. But most people, while not rooted to the soil, are rooted to their nations. And they don’t seem much to like those who aren’t.

“most people..are rooted to their nations”

I’ll quote again Eric Hobsbawm’s useful remark that identities are not like hats – you can can wear more than one at a time. Chris – and many others – feel that Brexit deprives them of access to/institutional expression of their identity as Europeans (in the sense of citizens of the EU). In this he is right. It’s an adjustment a great many have had to make (I personally know those who feel the loss of their Soviet or Yugoslav identities). Yet, contra those who voted to leave, the nation is an increasingly thin identity institutionally, one needing to be supplemented economically and politically, vulnerable to the pull on its elites of more powerful forms, fissioned by identities of religion and region that no longer align nationally. The EU put too little effort into building symbols around which people could rally, too much into technocratic management.

Historically, nations are recent as the dominant form of identity. I don’t know what other identities will come more to the fore, but the liberal ideal of cosmopolitan individualism doesn’t look to be a contender.

Most people, while not rooted to the soil, are rooted to their nations. And they don’t seem much to like those who aren’t.

As someone who has spent large parts of his life living outside of his ‘nation’ and surely wouldn’t have appeared ‘rooted’ to it when there, that simply hasn’t been my experience (ymmv).

Please provide some evidence for the astonishing claim that a significant factor in the Brexit vote was a widely shared desire to make people like Chris Bertram more “rooted to the nation” by preventing them from living abroad?

dax @ 276

But most people, while not rooted to the soil, are rooted to their nations. And they don’t seem much to like those who aren’t.

I haven’t said anything in this debate because I feel I don’t know enough, but as a historian I understand that the ‘imagined nation’ is the the thing that’s powerful in these kinds of debates.

‘Hostility to elites as as class’ really isn’t the same thing as ‘hostility to elites for being too “rootless”‘.

Incidentally, and even though this thread is probably dying, I think that whatever one’s own preferred framework and analysis is, the question asked implicitly by TM @251 should merit attention; namely why do far-right xenophobic parties also rise in coherent, prosperous societies like Switzerland or Austria?

“Does the left actually support it even when its results do not go as the left would choose?”

No. That was easy.

TM @ 251, Z @ 287

On xenophobia in prosperous and stable societies.

Here is my hypothesis: there are societies that are doing better (Scandinavia) and that are doing worse (France). BUT–that’s an on-average, and averages here are very misleading.

Here’s the baseline “when we were doing well, we had” of most vaguely-populist parties.

A man with an average education can get a job easily in his geographical area, and expect to keep it. That job will provide an income sufficient to support a family.

Neither the US, nor any of the countries in western Europe, provide this nearly as well as they did in 1960. Some are doing better and some worse, but very few give an average-education 25-year-old anything like the job availability that his father or grandfather had at 25.

Yes, British brexiters are so opposed to British people living in Europe that their generation has a much-loved comedy, auf weidersehn pet, about a group of British men stealing German jobs in Germany.

This is an even more pathetic attempt to pretend the vote wasn’t about racism. And yet another example of not really getting this group or their generation at all.

Ok that wasn’t fair. It is hard to commit to process because people tend to think they are right, so when the process goes against them they want to abandon the process.

Most people are usually right, or are willing to tolerate right. Reasonable people can find a modus vivendi: you only basically get significant dispute when, you know, there are unreasonable people involved.

Processes work, except when they don’t. But you only see the failures, because “works like it’s supposed to” is invisible: when you get shitty, stupid ourcomes like “we need to hold a referendum and we’ll ignore the result if we don’t like it, but don’t think we’ll be happy if you do the same thing”, then absolutely you should reject the process. Delivering sensible outcomes is what political processes are for.

Collin Street: Processes work, except when they don’t. But you only see the failures, because “works like it’s supposed to” is invisible: when you get shitty, stupid outcomes . . . then absolutely you should reject the process. Delivering sensible outcomes is what political processes are for.

It seems like there’s a risk in this line of thinking of turning to a politics of immaculate conception, where good policy arises not from any recognizable human intercourse, but only from an inexplicable divine intervention and revelation.

The process can go wrong, but some process is always necessary. If I cannot get it together to bake a cake, I can go to the bakery and buy the damn cake, but I do not think polities get that sort of option in the main. If the polity or the economy is to develop along certain desirable lines, it is the polity that must do the developing. Process is the only means available and can not be disposed of; it is necessary to the ends to make the process work toward those ends.

Politics is, as one the other posts has it, a long slow boring of hard boards. Five steps forward, four steps back sometimes. Nothing is invented once and for all. We reproduce it, redesign, rebuild, reform.

Charges of racism are of course racialising.

@ bruce wilder
While I’m on the subject of imperialism, I’ll repeat my comments that you – and others – seem to generalise from your own unfortunate voting systems. In countries with preferential or proportional voting systems (especially where there is high turnout as in Australia where it’s compulsory) you get more diverse representation and legislation has to be argued out amongst a wider range of viewpoints.

I’m not saying the outcomes are necessarily better – I think they are sometimes but not always – but voting counts and democracy means something.

I seriously think that voting reform should be a major cause in the US and UK. I can see that it might seem too hard (genuinely, I’m not saying that to be snarky) but at least you could try to accept that governments elected by 30% of the population are not inevitable, and where there has to be more negotiation between different blocs, ideas get aired more.

It seems like there’s a risk in this line of thinking of turning to a politics of immaculate conception, where good policy arises not from any recognizable human intercourse, but only from an inexplicable divine intervention and revelation.

Byzantine generals problem: no decision-making system can generate sensible results if less than two-thirds the decision-making population is sensible. And declining participation rates aren’t declining uniformly.

“We subordinate groups, we people who are ‘under-represented’ in the halls of power – people of colour, Indigenous peoples, women etc – have an unfortunate habit of noticing things about the ruling classes.”

The people who voted for Brexit are very much NOT the ruling class. The whole problem with Brexit is that the ruling class was caught with its pants down on the vote.

Sebastian H @ 303
I wasn’t suggesting the people who voted Leave were ruling class – just responding to Basil’s apparent suggestion that the people who talk about race are the ones who are making the discussion ‘racialised’.

Race, like gender, becomes a factor when people are disadvantaged or oppressed on the basis of race. Pointing out that people are discriminated against or disadvantaged on the basis of race is not ‘racialising’ the discussion.

@310: Stereotyping large groups of people is bigotry, and that phenomena is not reserved to one gender or ethnic group. I think that basil is making the point that sweeping stereotypes, such as asserting that everyone who disagreed with you on a vote is a racist, is also dehumanizing the other.

Marc what about stereotyping people who openly claim to be racist? Is it bigotry to say someone is racist when they themselves demand that mantle?

Rich, your arguments about anti-semitism are undermined by your solid theory that solidarity is an illusion and a lie. And isn’t this racializing? It’s so hard when you go down this path isn’t it?

Collin Street: Byzantine generals problem: no decision-making system can generate sensible results if less than two-thirds the decision-making population is sensible. And declining participation rates aren’t declining uniformly.

That’s potentially the basis of a very sophisticated view of the coordination problem constitutional democracy solves imperfectly (except when it doesn’t and hasn’t).

One Point: I think an argument can be made on that basis that Britain’s twoplus-party, first-past-the-post system is better than it looks by Val @ 304’s criteria (maximize the practicing electorate by making voting compulsory and voting’s effectiveness as an expression of preference by better counting procedures). The Conservatives won a constitutional majority in Parliament with slightly less than 37% of the vote and with a turnout of 66% that means the government needed the active support of only one-quarter of the whole electorate. One might naively think democracy puts the minimum threshold of consensus at 50% plus one (extended for legitimacy purposes by whatever the loyal opposition gets), but the British have reduced it, in practice, to about 25% (again plus what the loyal opposition garners — and in Britain, the loyal opposition is supplemented by the possibility of potentially large third parties of self-alienated punters, like the Liberals or Scottish Nationalists).

Britain makes it easier to have a coherent policy, by reducing rates of effective voter participation.

Second Point (unrelated to the first): What constitutes “sensible” becomes itself a strategic and contested variable, in terms of how voters are encouraged to think and decide, and how leaders are encouraged to think and decide, which ideas are given the imprimatur of “sensible” and which ideas are marginalized, and, finally, which political groupings are alienated or marginalized and which elevated to legitimacy.

In the EU, centre-right liberals have achieved a neoliberal consensus. We’ve arguably been here before, with the idea of the self-regulating market economy achieving hegemonic dominance in the realm of ideas, but encountering resistance. This was Polanyi’s point in the Great Transformation, no? And, in stronger terms, Marx’s idea. A ruling class pursues its interest in economic dominance by means disguised by ideological rationalizations, while disabling the opposition by the same means.

For many participants in the political decision-making process for the EU, neoliberalism constitutes all that is “sensible” and “there is no alternative”. This is largely true in Britain as well as a matter of ideology, but (and this is a big but) Britain has not joined in the EU consensus; for circumstantial reasons, it keeps asking for exceptions.

My point in outlining certain facts of EU politics was that Britain hasn’t been participating in EU political governance for some time. The Brexit referendum may have surprised the ruling class in Britain, but it also reflected political reality. Britain has a generally exceptional relationship with the EU and does not participate so much as it asks for exceptions that put it at odds to the neoliberal structure of the four freedoms. The result has been a mutual antipathy between the EU leadership and the British ruling class. And, it should not be lost on anyone that Britain despite this odd-man-out role in the formal mechanisms of EU decision-making is nevertheless a dominant player. Britain’s capital, London, is the world financial capital — its only global rival, New York, well outside the EU. And, as a consequence, British law governs European finance in many technical details.

Third Point: Does marginalizing “the racists” solve the Byzantine Generals problem? Or exacerbate and exemplify it?

It is not just that “those people” have become insensible (if they have), but that they are being treated as insensible.

There’s good reason to believe that if we isolate authoritarian followers in one political grouping, that will make that political grouping insensible and the remaining political groupings, deprived of authoritarian followers, less capable of disciplined action.

How we segregate political viewpoints and sentiments and ambivalence affects the ability to reach consensus. It isn’t simply a matter of how many may be natively “sensible” and therefore amenable to persuasion and organization, but also how they are distributed and organized. (I’m sure that’s too abstract, but I’ve run out of time.)

When Gordon Brown met Gillian Duffy, they thought their ‘questions’ about immigrants taking jobs so extreme, they called Duffy, ‘a bigoted woman’. This judgment didn’t stop Brown declaring ‘British jobs for British workers’ and standing by the sentiment even after being called out for it, nor after the call got taken up by the xenophobes, and not even after leaving office. Brown of course was an eager campaigner for Remain. Duffy declared for Exit.

++
John Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution!!!’ brought back by Julia Gillard, affirmed by Kevin Rudd. Swarthy foreigners in cages on faraway islands. Gillard, even without the electoral/governing pressure that liberals use to excuse their vilest actions, goes about telling TV that they think it was a brave and necessary decision. I’ve never heard anyone call Gillard racist.

Barack Obama lectures Africa, asking the continent to take responsibility for its economic and political situation, and to stop blaming the West for it. They tell ‘black’ fathers to stop acting like boys, instead of men.

Bill Clinton starts to build a wall between the US and Mexico in 1994(?). This and other anti-immigrant measures become bipartisan policy. Today, with record breaking deportation numbers under Obama, prejudiced profiling practices and with anti-immigration measures filling the carceral complex, Trump’s adoption and extension of these policies elicits shock and denunciation.

++
I’m interested in how, and when, it is permissible to label an opinion, action or policy racist. I’m interested in how mainstream political opinion and explanation reproduces and nurtures race divisions and their antagonisms, and in how available some of the most put upon, vulnerable people are for ex-communication when they take refuge in, affirm, and vocalise exclusive and destructive identities.

Yes, racism is a real and growing problem in these times, but we might think more carefully about how racist and racialist attitudes are popularly engendered, indulged and legitimised. We oughtn’t ignore how the pressure to migrate to alien country in the first instance, or to resist such migration, is produced by a cruel, and racist political and economic system.

*I really hope I’ve typed out racism/racist a sufficient number of times to inoculate myself against recurring charges of trivialising racism.

basil if you’ve never heard anyone call Julia Gillard racist you need to get out more.

basil 08.27.16 at 9:14 pm
…
I’m interested in how, and when, it is permissible to label an opinion, action or policy racist.
…

Permissible? It’s the first I’ve heard that anybody requires permission before using the label. I can’t imagine who’d be responsible for issuing this permission.

I was passing by this on my way to something else on the main page and this caught my eye:

CB: “Though some Brexiters now seem appalled at what they have wrought, they seem incapable of grasping the full complexity of the rights that need reviewing and protecting which go beyond residence and work but extend to family life, and many social rights.”

I estimate that it takes an advanced degree to truly grasp the full complexity of these rights, so the common mass of uneducated people are de facto unable to engage in politics under this understanding. People used to say “socialism or barbarism”, but the equivalent for our day is technocracy or anarchy.