The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological \u2013 and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.<\/p>\n
A few years ago\u00a0the American writer Chris Hedges wrote a book he titled the Death of the Liberal Class. His argument was not so much that liberals had disappeared, but\u00a0that they had become so coopted by the right wing and its goals \u2013 from the subversion of progressive economic and social ideals by neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine in prosecuting aggressive and expansionist wars overseas in the guise of \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d \u2013 that liberalism had been hollowed out of all substance.<\/p>\n
Liberal pundits sensitively agonise over, but invariably end up backing, policies designed to benefit the bankers and arms manufacturers, and ones that wreak havoc domestically and abroad. They are the “useful idiots” of modern western societies.<\/p>\n
Reading this piece<\/a> on the fallout from Brexit by Zoe Williams, a columnist who ranks as leftwing by the current standards of the deeply diminished Guardian, one can isolate this liberal pathology in all its sordid\u00a0glory.<\/p>\n Here is a revealing section, written by a mind so befuddled\u00a0by decades of neoliberal orthodoxy that it has lost all sense of the values it claims to espouse:<\/p>\n There is a reason why, when Marine le Pen and Donald Trump congratulated us on our decision, it was like being punched in the face \u2013 because they are racists, authoritarian, small-minded and backward-looking. They embody the energy of hatred. The principles that underpin internationalism \u2013 cooperation, solidarity, unity, empathy, openness \u2013 these are all just elements of love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One wonders where in the corridors of the EU bureaucracy Williams identifies that \u201clove\u201d she so admires. Did she see it when the Greeks were being crushed into submission after they rebelled against austerity policies that were themselves a legacy of European economic policies that\u00a0had required Greece to sell off the last of\u00a0its\u00a0family silver?<\/p>\n Is she enamoured of this internationalism when the World Bank and IMF go into Africa and force developing nations into debt-slavery, typically after a dictator has trashed the country decades after being installed and propped up with arms and military advisers from the US and European nations?<\/p>\n What about the love-filled internationalism of Nato, which has relied on the EU to help spread its military tentacles across Europe close to the throat of the Russian bear? Is that the kind of cooperation, solidarity and unity she was thinking of?<\/p>\n Williams then does what a lot of liberals are doing at the moment. She calls for\u00a0subversion of the democratic will:<\/p>\n The anger of the progressive remain side, however, has somewhere to go: always suckers for optimism, we now have the impetus to put aside ambiguity in the service of clarity, put aside differences in the service of creativity. Out of embarrassment or ironic detachment, we\u2019ve backed away from this fight for too long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That includes seeking the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn, of course. \u201cProgressive\u201d Remainers, it seems, have had enough of him. His crime is that he hails from \u201cleftwing aristocracy\u201d \u2013 his parents were lefties too, apparently, and even had such strong internationalist principles that they first met at a committee on the Spanish civil war.<\/p>\n But Corbyn\u2019s greater crime, according to Williams, is that \u201che is not in favour of the EU\u201d. It would be too much trouble for her to try and untangle the knotty problem of how a supreme internationalist like Corbyn, or Tony Benn before him, could be so against the love-filled EU. So she doesn\u2019t bother.<\/p>\n We will never know from Williams how a leader who supports oppressed and under-privileged people around the world is cut from the same cloth as racists like Le Pen and Trump. That would require the kind of \u201cagile thinking\u201d she accuses Corbyn of being incapable of. It might hint that there is a leftwing case quite separate from the racist one \u2013 even if Corbyn was not allowed by his party to advocate it \u2013 for abandoning the EU. (You can read my arguments for Brexit here<\/a> and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n But no, Williams assures us, Labour needs someone with much more recent leftwing heritage, someone who can tailor his or her sails to the prevailing winds of orthodoxy. And what\u2019s even better, there is a Labour party stuffed full of Blairities to choose from. After all, their international credentials have been proven repeatedly, including in the killing fields of Iraq and Libya.<\/p>\n And here, wrapped into a single\u00a0paragraph, is a golden nugget of liberal pathology from\u00a0Williams. Her furious\u00a0liberal plea is to rip up\u00a0the foundations\u00a0of democracy: get rid of the democratically elected Corbyn and find a way, any way, to block the wrong referendum outcome. No love, solidarity, unity or empathy for those who betrayed her and her class.<\/p>\n There hasn\u2019t been a more fertile time for a Labour leader since the 1990s. The case for a snap general election, already strong, will only intensify over the coming weeks. As the sheer mendacity of the leave argument becomes clear \u2013 it never intended to curb immigration, there will be no extra money for the NHS, there was no plan for making up EU spending in deprived areas \u2013 there will be a powerful argument for framing the general election as a rematch. Not another referendum, but a brake on article 50 and the next move determined by the new government. If you still want to leave the EU, vote Conservative. If you\u2019ve realised or knew already what an act of vandalism that was, vote Labour.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological \u2013 and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader. A few years ago\u00a0the American writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,57,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-2145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}