Just read yet another appalling academic article on Brexit, blaming every possible form of bigotry without ever descending to the realm of evidence. With honourable exceptions, academia has spectacularly failed to meet the intellectual challenge of the Leave vote. [THREAD] 1/7
Like most academics, I strongly backed Remain & would do so again in a heartbeat. That's not a problem, so long as we are intellectually curious about people who think differently. We do this routinely in all kinds of other fields. 2/7
In my own subject, history, we're constantly confronted with ideas & practices of which we disapprove. We work hard to understand why people who were not vicious or stupid burned witches, backed fascist parties, built empires & enforced systems of racial & sexual oppression. 3/7
Yet when it comes to Brexit, too many of us treat it as a mental disorder that is beyond the category of rational analysis. We march around like quack doctors in a psychiatric ward, diagnosing "imperial nostalgia", "xenophobia", "postcolonial melancholia" & other pathologies. 4/7
This matters: not because we shdn't have opinions or engage them in our work; not (just) because the evidential bar should be high for such claims; not even because concepts like "postcolonial melancholia" are more interesting & sophisticated than the use being made of them. 5/7
Even (especially?) if we oppose Brexit, we need a clear understanding of how Leave built the largest electoral coalition in British history, with the diverse motives that implies. We need to think hard about why "experts" are so distrusted & what those voters might do next. 6/7
That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but it does mean listening – and asking hard questions of ourselves, about how we much we really know about the electorate. We're failing to do that at the moment & we need to try harder. Otherwise, we're just jeering from the sidelines.[END]
