INTERVIEW
7
Democracy in crisis? 2016, the year of surprises
dissolve the European project. The first casualty was one of the most unexpected: on 23 June, citizens of the UK voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. E2C spoke with Neil Howard from the UK, who recently joined IOB as a post-doc.
E2C: How do you think it came about that this decision was to be made by referendum? Do you think a referendum was the right tool to make this decision?
NH: It was a calculated gamble on the part of former Prime Minister
David Cameron as a way of keeping on-board but then ultimately sidelining a particular wing of his governing coalition. Was it the right tool? It would depend on what your goal is. I think it was important for British people to be able to have a conversation about the EU, and more generally to engage in politics in a meaningful way. I’ m sad about the result, and I question the authenticity of basically any liberal democratic decision given the masses of disinformation that structures people’ s thinking— but I think that’ s a separate question. Was it the right thing for Cameron to have done? Evidently not. Was it the right thing from the perspective of engaging the British polity? Maybe. Or in more nuanced terms, it has pros and cons.
E2C: Why did so many people fail to see this particular outcome( Brexit) as a real possibility?
NH: A shocking lack of understanding basically on the part of most media analysts. The state of British media is not terribly dissimilar to the state of US media. In both cases it’ s very polarized between Right and Left, and the sort of Left main-stream is super insulated. There are very few journalists who go out and talk to people in more serious ways, and those that do were all saying‘ Look, this could happen, because there is massive, legitimate disaffection, which is getting tacked on to this one binary question.’ So for me, it wasn’ t a terrible surprise.
The Labour / Democratic establishments on both sides of the Atlantic misunderstand the nature of popular frustration, and that’ s basically because they talk to themselves. They don’ t see the contradictions in their own position that invite rejection on large scales from sections of the population. But on a much wider scale, the right wing media in both the US and the UK are obviously very powerful and clearly ideological in their ability and desire to manipulate popular consciousness. We have sophisticated disinformation machines, and I think what happened on both sides of the Atlantic was that very legitimate
Exchange to change January 2017