Been conversing (on and offline) with grassroots Brexitists again. Really struck by their intense lack of interest in the details of how to make it happen – verging on hostility to it, as if the search for practical steps to make it work is a trap (1/9)
I think that’s one more piece of evidence for the fact that Brexitism is a species of Utopian ideology, for which the belief in its happening is more important than its actually happening (2/9)
The actuality of Brexit will always be a let-down compared to the dream so there is an (unconscious?) need to prolong the dream and protect it from mundane reality (3/9)
But it’s not a utopianism aimed at the future – it is animated by a spirit of ‘hope’ (that ‘anything can happen’) but the ideal it wishes for isn’t a future society (4/9)
Its wish is to become/embody an archetype - an ideal sort of (English) person, cleansed of Un-English things and with the power to make anything happen (like English Gods of old) (5/9)
There’s also definitely a ‘carnivalesque’ dimension to it all – a utopian and very un-Conservative investment in overthrowing everything about the present, undermining things which think they are 'sophisticated' and fouling the public square (6/9)
These are all reasons why it doesn’t fit ‘left-right’ and why it confounds political science models which don't usually have yearning or desire or fantasy as variables. It’s a bit like what Marx & Engels mocked as “Feudal Socialism” - “half lamentation, half lampoon...(7/9)
“… half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history” (8/9)
Of course, this is grassroots Brexitism I’m describing. Elite Brexitism is a whole other (decadent) thing (9/9).
