Here is what I am struggling to understand about Brexit: The Conservatives are risking what are supposed to be core commitments - the union and supporting British businesses. Why have they found it so easy to do this? [Thread]
One way of seeing the risk to the union is that pro-Brexit Tories are retreating from British to English nationalism. The risk to the economy has been explained as part of an attempt to turn England/UK into a deregulated offshore annex to US.
While these explanations do hold water, I don't think they are sufficient on their own. What seems to be happening is that for a hardcore of the right, Brexit is becoming a goal towards which everything can be sacrificed, yet simultaneously evacuated of meaning.
Brexit is now about Brexit, first and foremost. It is purposeless, devoid of content, absent of any positive content. It will not lead to anything but Brexit. It has no value and yet it has a value beyond price.
Brexit is transgression, in the purest anthropological sense. It is not tied into the workings of instrumental reason. It simply exists. It is beyond worldly concerns. It evokes deep desires that cannot be spoken of or rationalised.
...and all of this is why the pleas from the growing chorus of individuals, industries and interest groups to consider the negative impact of a no-deal Brexit, are to a degree futile, at least to the Brexit ultras. Any sacrifice is worth it.
The only hope is that those Brexiters who still have a foot in the world of instrumental reason, who see it as a means to an end rather than an end in and on itself, will understand that they now have nothing in common with the ultras.
Those who wanted Brexit because it would lead to somewhere positive, need to understand that their cause has been hijacked by those who do not care where it leads. The Apollonian Brexiteers must triumph over their Dionysian cousins. [Ends]
