"People in this country have had enough of experts,” Micheal Gove told Faisal Islam before the referendum. Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The lead up to and aftermath of the Brexit vote was and is extremely concerning for multiple reasons, but one in particular has gone unnoticed. When Michael Gove, being interviewed by Faisal Islam, said that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, the first response was to laugh. It turns out, however, that he was right. And that’s terrifying.
While it’s easy to argue that the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, ECB, industry leaders and corporate heads who pleaded for a Remain vote merely represent an array of vested interests, that academics, charities, social activists, artists, and independent economists who were also overwhelmingly lined up against Leave shows that the weight of the ‘objective’ Brexit debate fell on the side of the Remain camp. That voters rejected these opinions signals more than a protesting frustration at political elitism or a so-called cosmopolitan condescension: it signals the first major British legitimisation of a dangerous anti-intellectualism.
But I don’t think that’s a lucky coincidence for the Leavers. I don’t think that the rejection of the ‘facts of the matter’ involved in the Brexit debate was a fortunate (for some) instance of an unfortunate trend to be found amongst the British voting public. Indeed, we’ve seen time and time again that a significant portion of the American voting public reject the facts on such black-and-white issues as manmade climate change. But not in the UK, right? Actually, I think this ‘post-factualism’ is the central component of a broader right-wing strategy to nullify any and all opposition political narratives, and as a thoroughly ubiquitous form of social control. Let’s call it, for reasons that will soon become apparent, the politics of confusion.
