(Images here from the 2005 movie V for Vendetta)
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I've avoided committing these kinds of thoughts to pixels, apart from briefly here in June 2016, but here goes. I still think that culture is more important, enduring, and flexible, than politics.
Regardless of your stance on Brexit, I think that we are observing the 'Ulsterisation' of UK politics, and perhaps politics across wider 'western' society. But it hasn't happened overnight. It has been developing, ignored, for the past few decades. Like the plot of some sci-fi B movie, unspoken forces were seeded underground a long time ago and have been creaking and hatching ever since. Suddenly they have now broken through. The wreckage is everywhere.
Countries which have for those decades ignored their social fractures and tensions, are now experiencing the sort of 'two tribes' politics which we specialise(d) in here, and for which we used to be chastised by various world leaders. Now their successors are experiencing similar dynamics within their own populations.
Brexit has forged two political communities in the UK which have very little to do with the old party loyalties of the past 100 years. The state of the Conservative and Labour parties show this - both are riven on the issue. The endless diet of coverage galvanises these two communities into hard camps. 'Leave' and 'Remain' are no longer just administrative preferences, they have quickly become badges of personhood, defining the new human tribes of 'Leavers' and 'Remainers'. There are few shades of grey in between. As with here, for generations these tribes have read their own newspapers, listened to their own spokespersons, absorbed their own journalists. They do so even more so now, creating 'echo chambers' of 'bias confirmation', consuming what suits their tastes from the digital media menu, messages which reinforce that you are right and good and they are wrong and bad.
As with here, socially these tribes hardly ever encounter each other. They live in different worlds. When they find themselves in each other's presence, there is a discomfort or near-horror; social etiquette causes them to avoid the big issue and maintain polite small-talk. So there is little or no interaction, little or no empathy. 'They' must be defeated.
The two communities have widely differing life experiences, inherited understandings, lifestyles, and aspirations, and the EU Referendum was simply an outlet for that. David Goodhart has famously described these as the somewheres and the anywheres (BBC video here). Since June 2016 they have become committed opponents, suspicious of each other and unable or unwilling to empathise with the other. Maybe even now forged into enemies. Just listen to the phone-in shows. Watch the social media arguments. Speak to your friends in England in particular. If you make a light-hearted remark on the subject you do so at your own peril.
Once-sensible media voices become fevered. The decline of the traditional media has turned into a dogfight for survival in the online world, where advertising revenue depends upon clicks, and so the outrage machine has developed to generate anger, and to then convert that anger into income. One community gets told lies about the other, about people who were until very recently their neighbours. Hideous caricatures are painted in your mind about the type of people they are. You start to believe the exaggerations. You get radicalised.
Just why did 17.4 million people vote 'Leave'? Are they all - as the mainstream media would have us believe - stupid, gullible, racist, bigots? Gordon Brown's 2010 accusation that 65 year old Rochdale woman Gillian Duffy was a 'racist' comes to mind. Emily Thornberry's similar remarks about 'white van man' in 2014 are another example. Trump voters are similarly characterised by the loudest American voices.
I doubt that these simplistic diagnoses are the full story. Because no 'decent person' wants to be any of those things, perhaps the smears are strategically deployed with the intention of causing a recoil, and thereby stopping some of those people from ever voting that way again. But smarter voices - like this video from the Cato Institute – have a deeper set of thoughts.
The entire UK has been polarised and Ulsterised – along lines that are different than ours, but with similar social effects. And it has of course added a whole new world of complexity here, and the issues around the border and 'backstop'. Northern Ireland has lived in an ambiguous dual-nationality detente since 1998. There is no room for ambiguity now.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks, the tectonic plates have utterly shifted, releasing huge subterranean pressures, and the future will not just be a simple reset to a pre-2016 world. Whether there is a Brexit or not, the underlying issues which caused Brexit in the first place have never been fully identified and taken seriously by government, not reflected upon by the media and the nation, not considered by neighbours. Those issues still, dare I say it, remain.
But there will be no going back.
(PS: Acclaimed Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi's forthcoming book, Hate Inc. - link here - looks like it will be an important one.)
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