Fifteen Eighty Four

“Demagoguery and the decline of democracy” This is the subtitle of my new book with CUP. But it might just as well be a headline on 5 November 2024 when Donald Trump was voted 47^th president of the United States. There is wide consensus that his choice of far-right cronies to his government is a threat to the democratic institutions of the United States. As is well known now, his people promote the dismantling of administrative departments, in order to ensure loyalty to Trump and his ideology, which preaches nationalism, protectionism, practises the demonization and dehumanisation of migrants, threatens massive deportation of ‘undocumented’ ethnic minorities and the hunting down of ‘internal enemies’. Trump is a nationalist populist who achieved electoral victory through mass deployment of deceptive rhetoric. In other words, he was the classic demagogue that the ancient Greek and Roman writers warned us about.

            What does this have to do with the UK leaving the EU? The key thread running through my book is the argument that it was not just economic neglect or austerity. Underlying political resentment and anti-foreigner prejudice certainly existed not far below the surface. But, while they may have been necessary conditions, they were not sufficient to explain what swayed the voters. I argue that it was above all the populist demagoguery of the pro-Brexit campaigners that talked the electorate, or enough of it, into voting to leave the EU. And by ‘demagoguery’ I mean the use of the emotive and deceptive potential of human language, rather than the use of evidence and reason.

            But that is not all. Brexitspeak operates in a particular historical, cultural and political context. The national context is only part of the story, yet many people think of Brexit as a primarily British phenomenon. From the start of my book, however, I show that it was part of a wave of far-right populist identitarianism that has spread across Europe and the United States. This twenty-first century trend has to be understood against a historical backdrop that takes us from the political thinking of the classical philosophers onwards to the Nazi apologists of the twentieth century and beyond. In that history, we hear a lot about demagogues, misleading leaders who manipulate political language to rouse the all too pliable of demos.

            The identitarian shift of the twenty-first century, and the demagogues leading it, bring a serious threat to democracies world-wide. Of course, Brexit has its own particular British characteristics and Brexitspeak delves into these, going back to the seventeenth century and returning to the Enlightenment and its current detractors. In the case of Brexit and the discourse that drove it, there are deep origins in European nationalist, Fascist and Nazi thinking that has not entirely gone away. Indeed, this worldview and the rhetoric that is key to it is becoming normalised and is going mainstream. British Brexitism is but one manifestation of the right-wing national populism. Its natural sequel is the authoritarianism that is seeking to install itself on both sides of the Atlantic. The clearest expression of national populism during the campaigns for the UK to leave the EU came from Nigel Farage and his United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). So in one chapter of Brexitspeak, I trace the origins of this movement, whose ideology persists now in mainstream politics in the shape of Farage’s Reform UK party – and in the Conservative Party’s swing rightwards to join him.

            In identitarianism, national identity always rests on a self-versus-other polarity. And this other is always a threatening enemy – frequently an ethnic out-group, but also now, as in the Trump case, an enemy within. In Brexitspeak, the enemy other was ‘immigrants’ on the one hand and ‘the establishment elite’ on the other. The Brexit demagogues understood early on that tapping into latent British racism was the key to swinging the referendum. Here again, Britain had its own characteristic version. In Brexitspeak, I pursue the racist trail back to that arch-demagogue Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. His influence percolated through into the obscene conversations of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, into the mainstream writing of academics, journalists and into Farage’s far-right Brexitism. In its’ latest form, racist discourse is not overt as Powell’s was, but conveyed largely by hints, code words, and dog-whistles – but it is none the less potent for that.            

So what about the linguistics of Brexiter demagoguery? Brexitspeak applies some tools of analysis derived from the linguistic sciences and described in an accessible way in the book’s Introduction. To give a foretaste… One of the markers of national-populist Brexitism was, and is, the collective and exclusionary pronoun we, as in ‘we (British)’. It was not only found in pro-Brexit rhetoric. As I show in the book, mainstream politicians used it too, including PM David Cameron, a remainer, in a failed attempt to appease the Brexiters of his party. But a weaponised we is always a marker of far-right national-populist discourse, wherever it crops up. To take one example from the book, a poster affixed to a door in a block of flats in Norwich declared: ‘We do not tolerate people speaking other languages other than English … we are finally our own country again’.

In another poster, the notorious UKIP “Breaking Point” billboard, we is there again, against a sinister background image that is disturbingly similar to Nazi propaganda film footage. The objective in such far-right discourse is to arouse fear, fear of an ‘invasion’ of dangerous aliens. Does all that sort of thing really affect people, isn’t it all just ‘metaphor’? Well, no. The reason demagogues produce such tropes is that they intuitively know that the mere uttering of words associated with things perceived as dangerous can, as neuroscience has demonstrated, causes the brain’s emotional circuits to get active. The speeches of Farage’s buddy Donald Trump are strewn with threat words. It is by deploying emotive language, denying facts, distorting facts, and downright lying that national populists talked sufficient of the British electorate into Brexit. It is by such means that Trump’s MAGA movement talked itself and others into launching the United States on the path to authoritarianism.

Brexitspeak by Paul Chilton