Brexit: Reading the runes

Evans and Menon’s Brexit and British Politics is not the first book about Brexit, but it’s a shrewd and convincing analysis. This referendum wasn’t just about Europe

Anyone who, in the wake of the Brexit vote, still thinks that it is politics as usual should read Evans and Menon’s Brexit and British Politics. This slim volume explains clearly why the June 2016 referendum wasn’t wholly about the EU. It also demonstrates that the mendacity or otherwise of the campaign may be moot, because the result was probably preordained. It’s a convincing thesis in many ways, but there are one or two odd omissions.

Geoffrey Evans is Professor of the Sociology of Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has published widely on inequality and politics. Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College, London. He has written a great deal on the European Union, including but not limited to Britain’s role in it. Together they are, I suppose, paid-up members of the great and the good, and the sort of experts that Michael Gove thinks we have all had enough of. That hasn’t stopped them from writing a challenging analysis on the roots of the Brexit vote.

The authors point out that in the 1990s and 2000s, Europe wasn’t really the pressing issue for the public that it was for Tory MPs. “The percentage of Britons citing Europe among ‘the major issues facing Britain today’ rose to double figures in the 1990s ...but the EU never became a decisive political issue,” they say, pointing out that by 2001 it had sunk back so that just 14% named it as an issue that might determine their vote.

What was happening at the same time, however, was an evolution in politics that concentrated all debate in the centre. Evans and Menon see this as a phenomenon of the Blair era and they are surely right to ascribe a large part of it to the New Labour project; as Labour chased Basildon Man, a broader polity disappeared. One might call this centrification (my phrase, not theirs). They refer to it as an elite consensus. Within it, acceptance of globalization was not open to question. Importantly, neither was a certain liberal set of values on matters such as gay marriage and capital punishment. One of the nice insights of this book is that it sees this “values factor” as equally important in fostering a sense among those not part of this consensus that they were excluded from influence, and that politics did not serve them. The authors also note a growing homogenization in MPs’ backgrounds; professional politicians replaced the trade-union representatives of the past, for example. So when the 2016 referendum offered people a rare chance to register a protest against the elite consensus, they took it.

Evans and Menon may ascribe a little too much of this “centrification” to Blair’s era; there was concern in the early 1960s about so-called Butskellism, the easy consensus around certain centrist preoccupations or views. (Rab Butler was a prominent Tory politician of the late 1950s; Gaitskell the moderate Labour leader of the same era. Both were robbed of the premiership – Butler by Harold Macmillan, and Gaitskell by death.) Even in the 1970s, a lively time in politics, there was a perception that ideology no longer mattered. I can remember William Davis, editor of Punch, writing in 1973 that it was now, “Forget the politics: Are we better managers than the other lot?” So this ossification around an elite consensus in the 1990s was not really new. But it is true that interest in politics fell away rapidly in the time of New Labour, as Evans and Menon themselves demonstrate. “In the 1970s and 1980s, close to 80% would go to the polls,” they say. “Since the turn of the century, ...the average has been around 63%.” But for the Referendum it was 72.2%.

From all this, one could conclude that people voted leave purely because they had a chance, for once, to give the establishment a good kicking, and were not that interested in the EU at all. In fact, Evans and Menon don’t go quite that far. They make it clear that many voters did have reservations about the EU and that most British people had never really identified with Europe (apparently they scored 28th out of 28 for “feeling European”). The Single European Act of 1987, creating the single market, probably took integration as far as most British people really wanted to go. Neither do they ignore the role of immigration in the debate. The authors are also careful about the common analysis that Leave voters were the poor and those left behind by globalization and European integration. There is truth in this, they say, but it is not the whole truth; there were actually more middle-class Leave voters than there were working-class (to be sure, this does turn a bit on definitions). Brexit was not entirely a revolt by the dispossessed. Neither do Evans and Menon ascribe the breakdown of confidence in politics solely to “centrification”; they also cite (for example) the ghastly expenses scandal of 2009, when MPs were caught fiddling their expenses on a massive scale.

Even so, the authors make a compelling case that Brexit was not simply a vote on Europe. It was to a large extent a rebellion against a centrist consensus – and against a perceived elite with which that consensus was identified. The referendum campaign itself, as they demonstrate, made very little difference at all.

However, there is an elephant in the room that Evans and Menon ignore, although it has been trumpeting loudly and crapping on the floor for many decades. This is the British electoral system, which they mention only two or three times, and very briefly. They are clearly aware of it as a factor, but do not seem to attach much weight to it. But it is the biggest single factor in the exclusion of most people from the political process.

This is partly just because it delivers results that do not reflect popular voting intentions, and also excludes huge areas of the political spectrum from power. This is evident from the 2015 general election results. The Tories were able to secure an absolute majority in the Commons although they received the support of only 37% of the voters , and only 24% of those registered to vote. Again, the culprit is the “winner-takes-all” electoral system. According to the UK’s Electoral Reform Society: “Labour saw their vote share increase while their number of seats collapsed. The Conservatives won an overall majority on a minority of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats lost nearly all their seats – despite winning 8% of the vote. The SNP won 50% of the Scottish vote share, but 95% of Scottish seats.” UKIP won more than one in eight of the votes cast but just one seat. It could be added that many will have abstained because they knew their votes wouldn’t count where they lived. No wonder people feel that politics does not serve them.

However, simple inequities in the result aren’t the whole story; even worse, the system makes a relatively small number of voters pivotal and sends the political discourse in their directon, excluding everyone else. If you’re not a floating voter in a marginal, no-one cares for your opinions. This is what happened in the 1990s when the two main parties chased Basildon Man. They forgot about everyone else. On June 23 2016 the political establishment paid the price for refusing to change an iniquitous electoral system that kept them in power.

There is a further point that Evans and Menon don’t discuss, although they will be aware of it. This is the perceived denigration of national identity by a pro-European elite – an especially sore point amongst the English. This is related to the “values” issue that the authors do cover so well. However, it is distinct from that and especially toxic, as the referendum and its aftermath have been accompanied by some nasty displays of noisy nationalism. The way some in politics have played on this has been very worrying – for example, the silly business about getting blue passports back (the old ones were black not blue, and in any case the colour change wasn’t insisted upon by the EU). And yet one understands how some English people feel. The morning after the referendum, a picture was widely posted by Remain voters; it showed delicious European foods on one side and a solitary can of beans on the other. The picture was well-shot, and in a way witty, but one wonders if it was wise. No-one likes to see their culture insulted. Remain voters may be right, but they often struggle to understand the other side.

Notwithstanding these caveats, Evans and Menon’s analysis is shrewd and interesting. If they miss one or two insights, they have plenty more to offer – and in any case, it is early days; one suspects they will have more to say when the time is right. In the meantime, Brexit and British Politics is thought-provoking, and a good read.

Evans and Menon finish by warning that the Brexit vote has left British politics in disarray, with a rudderless political establishment trying to work out where it now stands, and a deep divide between the governors and the governed. In a telling quote, they describe how one of them warned in a pre-vote debate that Brexit would cause a reduction in GDP – only to be told by an audience member, “That’s your bloody GDP, not mine.” Late in the book, the authors quote journalist Chris Deerin, writing in The Herald Scotland in summer 2017: “The collapse of trust in our politicians, our politics, our institutions and our post-war settlement is real and it is profound. It pervades every layer of British society ...The titled, the humble and the dogs in the street alike know that our democracy has gone wonky.”

So what do we do now?

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

On truth and lies. And how to show a troll the difference

Appalled by fake news and half-truths online? In despair at the latest lie on your neighbour’s Facebook page? Fear not. You can fight back. Let’s go trollhunting

There are plenty of lies flying around nowadays, online and in the media. The 2016 Brexit referendum and American election were distorted by fake news and half-truths. The Internet has arrived in politics in a big way and it ain’t pretty.  It shouldn’t be a surprise. The late Günter Grass foresaw its use by the alt-right back in 2004, in his last novel, Crabwalk.  Now the web is heaving with stories from dodgy websites, propagated by social media and reinforced by half-truths from the nastier newspapers. And let’s be clear – while the worst abuses come from the right, the left has had a hand in this as well.

Mill: "the collision of adverse opinions" (Hulton Archive)

This is dangerous. As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty (1859), the lifeblood of democracy is the information we need with which to make decisions. Since “the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth,” he wrote, “it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.” We don’t know what Mill would make of Facebook, but I suspect he would tell us that this was the new marketplace in which ideas must compete, and that we needed to be out there. But sometimes we feel defenceless. We read something in the Mail or the Express or on someone's Facebook post and we suspect at once that it is either not true or not the whole truth, but we don't know for certain and can't prove it, so we shrug our shoulders and let it go unchallenged.

But we do have the weapons for trollhunting, and sometimes they're much easier to use than you might suppose. First, to track your troll, you need to recognize their droppings, and the exact species from which they came. So here’s a taxonomy of online bollocks.

What’s your source? 

If you're not sure whether the source site quoted is credible or not, Wikipedia will often tell you who funds it. The other day I had an argument about renewables with someone online and he threw figures at me that he said were from the US Gov't's Energy Information Administration (EIA). But they weren't on the EIA site and it turned out he'd got them from something called the Institute of Energy Research. It took me two minutes to find out it was funded by the Koch Brothers. (And they had quoted the figures without giving a proper source; they claimed they were from the EIA, but I could not find the figures on the EIA’s own site, and the data I did find there pointed in another direction.)

Relevant and meaningful? 
With a bit of effort, you can sometimes you can detect b.s. very quickly. It may be that all you need to do with a post or a news story is check its source. If it's Breitbart or similar, it's partisan. That does not of course mean that it is automatically lying. But it is unlikely to be the whole truth, so you'll probably find their original story was not properly referenced and can't be confirmed.

Besides checking the source, sometimes you can check whether a figure or fact being stressed is in fact meaningful. Thus the Daily Express ran a news article a few weeks ago drooling at the prospect of £2bn-a-year trade with India when Britain was free to trade with them after Brexit. What they didn't say was that Britain’s trade with the EU is currently worth more like £240bn. That's a fact easily found from government or international sources. Again, your first port of call can be Wikipedia - you might not want to just quote from them as they are sometimes wrong, but they almost always give an original source that you can check. (In fact Wikipedia at its best is superb.) 

The Express story also omitted to mention that we may not get a trade deal with India.

Image abuse 
Images used online will often turn out to be mislabelled or irrelevant. The left does this as well as the right. Last year lots of people shared a meme showing huge crowds of people attempting to board a ship. “These aren’t Syrians,” said the angry caption. “They’re Europeans trying to get to North Africa during World War II. So next time you think of closing the borders you might want to check with your grandparents.”

The Vlora arrives at Bari from Durres, 1991

The meme had been spread very widely (by my friends among others), but something was not right. First, the images were in colour. The Second World War was photographed in colour, but not much, and mainly only by the German and US press corps. It seemed unlikely either would have shot this. Also, merchant ships in the 1940s had a more angular structure.

When you smell a rat like this, the first step is to do a reverse image search and see if you can come up with the pic in its original context. (Google gives handy instructions on how to do that here.) This often works straightaway, but in this case the pics had been so widely shared that most results just showed the meme. What did work, was to search instead for the name of one of its ships and its port of registry, both of which were clearly visible on its stern. This turned up the pics in their real context and where they had really been taken; they were Albanians at the Italian port of Bari in 1991. This made sense, as the ship’s port of registry was Durres. It should be said that this set of images was misrepresented by the right as well as the left.

Lies, damn lies and... 

...Statistics. We are not all adept at reading these.  I found this out with a vengeance when I first tried to crunch the numbers I brought back from my PhD fieldwork. I struggled through with “how-to” books (the current choice includes Statistics without Tears, Statistics Done Wrong, Statistics for Dummies and, interestingly, How to Lie with Statistics – I must get that). The upside is that whoever throws a bunch of numbers at you may not know what they’re talking about either. The first step, if the story, post or comment quotes a source, is to check it. It may turn out to be completely specious. If you cannot find it, you can simply say so. If you can find a reliable figure that contradicts it, so much the better (more below on where to find such numbers).

 What if the other side can supply a source? The answer then is to go to that source, and see whether the numbers actually mean what you’ve been told they do. In the argument about renewables quoted above, my interlocutor was quoting the scale of subsidies to solar per kilowatt hour. As stated, I couldn’t find his figures. But what I did find was that figures for power supplied by renewables should carry a big health warning. Are you talking about generation capacity; about actual power generation; or about the output supplied to the grid? In the latter case, are you looking at the amount received by the grid or the distributed power from renewables? (Solar and wind produces surplus power that can’t be used sometimes, so these won’t be the same figure.)

That’s a subtle example. The misuse of figures can be a lot more crass than that – as when, before the referendum, we heard “scare stories” about the number of refugees coming into the EU; these never mentioned that Britain wasn’t accepting more than a tiny fraction. Sometimes a number quoted is simply not relevant; again, before Brexit, the figure of 77m Turkish immigrants was used to scare people. They were not told that Turkish accession to the EU is a long way away and that in any case, Turkey has much closer links with Germany than it does with Britain.

You may also find that the number is quoted without comparators, so that you can’t see if it’s meaningful – as in the Daily Express “Indian trade deal” example above.

Refuted already? 
It sounds obvious, but perhaps someone has already called out the author of a fake news item. In the case of the Albanian ship example, they hadn’t (they have since). But it’s easy to check. Extract a few well-chosen key words from the article and search online. Take one of the more outrageous statements, copy-and-paste it into the “exact word or phrase” box in Google Advanced Search, and see if someone has already quoted that statement – and then taken it apart. 

If it’s been widely circulated, someone will already have checked it. A classic case was a picture sent to me after I made a vaguely pro-Corbyn tweet; it showed him at an IRA funeral. It did look like Corbyn but I suspected it wasn’t.  Fortunately someone else actually knew. The picture had been taken at Bobby Sands’s funeral in 1981 and the individual was apparently Sands’s agent, Owen Carron, who succeeded him as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

It wasn't Jezza, actually

There are also websites that have been set up to fact-check stories that are whizzing around social media. The granddaddy of them all is www.snopes.com, debunking urban legends since 1995. On the day I dropped by while writing this piece, the stories covered included a claim that former Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders had blown $172,000 in campaign donations on an Audi R8 supercar. (Snopes found no evidence of this.) Snopes appears to be genuinely independent and funded from advertising revenue. A site with a similar mission, albeit very different in style, is Hoax Slayer (www.hoax-slayer.com), based in Queensland. This has also been around for a while. It devotes much energy to email scams, but also has a fake-news section that touches on the political now and then. The day I called by, it had zeroed in on a story that Monica Lewinsky’s son David had been found dead in Central Park. (It pointed out that Lewinsky did not have a son called David.)

For British readers, however, the go-to is probably Full Fact (www.fullfact.org). This is a heavyweight; it has the cachet of actually being a registered charity, a status that the Charity Commission was initially reluctant to grant it, and which it can remove if the site becomes too political. The trustees of Full Fact include members of the great and the good such as prominent LibDem peer Lord Sharkey and crossbencher Baroness Neuberger DBE, and funding comes from such impeccably liberal sources as the Rowntree Foundation (though also from some businesses – but these are publicly declared, and accounted for only 8% of income in 2015). A measure of Full Fact’s topicality can be seen from the 2017 General Election. Many media sources ascribed the results to the youth vote, but Full Fact quickly posted an item pointing out that no-one could possibly know yet, as there were simply no figures.  Especially attractive is an item headed Election 2017: what the parties haven’t told voters, an object lesson in why everything should be taken with a skipload of salt.

But if no-one’s refuted it yet? How do I do so? 
Sites like Full Fact are great at dealing with memes and urban myths that have attracted widespread attention. But what about the man who lives two doors up and posted a reply on one of your Facebook threads saying that ten thousand refugees are settling in Tonbridge every day, or that Europe is totally dependent on Britain for supplies of bendy bananas? Where are you going for the real facts?

For Brits, the first place should probably the Office for National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk). This has been around since 1996, but is descended from the Central Statistical Office, which had its origins in the second world war.  The ONS is independent of the political arm of government, and covers a wide range of subjects, including the economy and areas that are politically sensitive, such as migration (its latest Migration Statistics Quarterly Report was in May 2017 and is here, complete with a useful summary). Datasets are normally presented with definitions, including qualifications and exclusions. The ONS is a big haunted house, but if one searches for long enough, one can often find what one needs. Thus this afternoon a  conservative journalist tweeted that Britain’s population had risen by 5 million in 5 years and that this was a good reason for Brexit. It took me minutes to find out, on the ONS site, that the figure was untrue, and I tweeted back a link to the relevant page. The ONS site also has instructions on how to submit a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

Not just for MPs

Should you need your information in a more digestible form, you can head for the House of Commons Library. This  has a mass of research and information put together over the years to help MPs, including an impressive list of research briefings on (for example) social care, poverty and pensions – all topical. Much of this information might also be available on the ONS site if you know where to look, but the HoC Library might be easier. The website also has an impressive subsite providing information on Brexit and its projected consequences; it can be found here. For economic and budgetary information, there’s also the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), intended as an independent watchdog on budgetary and economic matters. Its mandate is to provide facts, not to pass judgement on policy; it won’t tell you that a policy is a good or bad idea, but will outline the fiscal consequences.

Many countries have similar offices and the OBR helpfully provides links to them on its own page. In the US, if you’re a member of Congress you might well ask your party leadership to submit your request to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which has lately been busy costing, among other things, the latest healthcare options as Republicans prepare to scrap Obamacare. The CBO is meant to be strictly nonpartisan. Specialist US government agencies also have information available on their websites (including the US Energy Information Administration, referred to earlier). Both these offices have a mass of information and data on their websites.

In the international arena, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and specialist UN and other transnational agencies all provide reservoirs of online information on matters such as poverty, access to education, health and more. To list them would take too much space, and in any case Wikipedia has a handy list of the UN bodies here. However, it is worth mentioning two that are worth visiting if you frequently argue with people over refugees or asylum seekers; these are the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Both have stats; UNHCR, in particular, has figures on the top refugee-hosting countries (hint: they’re not rich ones). It also points out that 55% of refugees are from three war-torn countries, casting doubt on the belief that most are economic migrants. 

Last but not least, Google is your friend. The advanced search facility allows you to specify accurate and specific search parameters. It can be set to return only recent results. It also permits a domain-specific search, so that if you want to find out when the OBR, say, or the BBC has referred to a particular topic, you can. This is sometimes much quicker and more accurate than using the search engines on the sites themselves, and presents the search results in a helpful hierarchy of relevance.

Learn your craft 
Many people’s online activism is devalued from the start because they don’t have any tradecraft. Some of us will never be very good with PCs, websites etc.; that’s just how it is, especially for older people like me. But often the tools are easier to master than they seem, and doing so can give you a huge advantage.

No, Bernie didn't buy an Audi R8 with campaign contributions

If you’re fighting battles on Facebook, and you want friends to help – informally, or as part of an activist group – learn how to help them help you. If you are dealing with a mendacious troll on the Facebook site of (say) a newspaper, you need to give people the exact link, not just say “please help me on the Express Facebook page”. If you do that they won’t find the post or thread, as newspaper sites can post tens of stories a day. It’s like calling in an airstrike without giving a map reference.

To get the exact link, go to the post or comment. Just under the poster's name or comment is the time at which they posted it (“just now”, “1hr ago”, “20 June at 20.00”, etc. Right-click on that date/time and a drop-down menu will appear, including the option “copy link”. Click on that then paste the link on your timeline of in a group where you are seeking help.Always remember that it is useless posting something that only a few people can see; you need to give your post the right privacy settings. Be aware that if you change them on a post, the next post may default to the same setting so you will need to change it again. 

To comment on a story on a newspaper’s own site, you will need to be signed in. The site will almost always offer you the option to do so with social media, but you can also set up an account for that newspaper, or (with a lot of publications, including the Spectator) with a service provider called Disqus. These can be better options than your Facebook or Twitter account if you wish to use a screen handle rather than your own name.

If you are involved in an argument on Twitter and need to ask friends or a group for help, you can get a link to the string by going to the small downward-facing arrow at the left of a tweet or reply; clicking on that will give you the option of displaying a tweet-specific link that you can then copy. If you have multiple battles going on and want your friends to come over and lend a hand, tell them to go to your Twitter profile and to click on the tab “Tweets and replies”; otherwise they won’t see your conversations and arguments, only your original tweets. Learn also how to use hashtags – this is very important; Twitter provides instructions here. You can use them on Facebook too and there are instructions (rather sketchy) here.

Last but not least, one does not want to state the obvious but: Who are you talking to? If you want to argue on behalf of refugees, do it in the comments section of a paper where people are unconvinced. This could be the Express or Mail but could also be the New Statesman or Telegraph. It sounds basic, but you will not change minds by talking only to those who agree with you.

Don’t give up 

All this is important. We are at war. Back in 1977 Paul Johnson, Boris's uncle, published a book called Enemies of Society, in which he castigated all those who made meaningless or unverified statements. They would, he said, destroy the basic certainties societies need to function. The book was written from a right-wing perspective; Johnson was a polemicist. But he was not wrong about this. Hannah Arendt made a similar point, in a very different way, from farther left, in her essay On Lying in Politics.

Check everything. Question it all. The enemies of society have not won yet, but there is not much time. Lies are a luxury we can’t afford.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

We, the people

Since 2016, populism has changed the political map of the western world – and there’s plenty more to come. But what is populism? Does it have shared roots with fascism? And who are “the people”? Two books – one new, one old – have something to tell us

The year 2016 saw the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, post-coup consolidation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the near-election of Norbert Hofer in Austria. The year that follows will see bids for power by Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in The Netherlands. These people are widely dismissed as “populists”. But what does that even mean?

In his short new book What is Populism?,  Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princetown University, suggests we don’t have an answer to that question. He then supplies one. A populist, he states, is someone who claims to identify with “the people”.  S/he rejects everyone else.  How “the people” are defined is left conveniently vague, but it is made clear that everyone not fitting that description is an outlier, a deviant, or, worse of all, part of an unresponsive “elite” against which s/he is leading a popular rebellion. Thus their views need not be taken into account. The populist, says Müller, is therefore inherently anti-pluralist – they cannot be a democrat. Yet they can present themselves as exactly that, through their claim to represent the popular base. 

The first part of this definition – identification with something called “the people” – is not new, but Müller presumably wouldn’t claim it was. What may break new ground is his suggestion that this identification makes the populist inherently anti-pluralist, because any definition of “the people” must exclude stakeholders in the polity that don’t meet it. Given the diversity of modern

societies, it’s fair to guess that a big percentage of the people won’t be “the people”. A quick glance at Trump and Britain’s Brexit advocate Nigel Farage bears this out. Trump actually didn’t win the popular vote in 2016, even though he won the electoral college; so his definition of “the people” may be missing a few “people”. As for Farage, the Brexit referendum was won 52-48%. Yet both men insist that “the people” have spoken.  (After the November election, we were treated to the sight of these men celebrating their victory over “the elites” in a gold-plated lift at Trump Tower.)

Should we worry about populists? After all, a leader whose politics make no sense will be called out in the end. The trouble is that they can do a lot of damage first. One reason is that, as Müller says, the populists can present themselves as democrats, although to him they are inherently not. “The danger is ...that [populism] promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals (Let the people rule!). ...That the end result is a form of politics that is blatantly antidemocractic should trouble us all.” He supports this last point with a discussion of the way populist governments of the left and right have behaved in Hungary, Venezuela and Poland. 

Müller has less to say about the way we must react to populism. He does talk about the safeguards that have been built into European constitutions since the war, but says little about the ways in which democracy has been defined, and then protected from populist capture. He could for example have raised the “tyranny of the majority” arguments set out by the Founding Fathers and by John Stuart Mill, and make the case for representative government. Müller has written widely about politics and government elsewhere, and it may be that he wished this book to be concise, with a precise focus; it explains and defines populism, and that is all it sought to do. But I believe that, having explained why populists can’t be pluralists, he could also have set out the ways one preserves pluralism.

What Müller does do, is to demand that we confront, but also engage with, populism. “I reject the paternalistic liberal attitude [of] therapy for citizens ‘whose fears and anger have to be taken seriously’,” he says. But he also rejects exclusion of populists from debate, pointing out that this will simply support their contention that the “popular will” is excluded from the “system”. I think he is right on both counts.

I would prefer to have read more in this book about the constitutional pluralist structures that can protect us from populism.  I would also have liked to see more analysis of why voters respond to populist leaders who clearly don’t have their best interests at heart. But perhaps these discussions would have blunted this concise, readable little book. Müller’s main purpose was simply to define populism – and he has certainly done that.  Moreover his definition of populism as inherently anti-pluralist is a well-argued and elegant warning. As Trump apparently said in May 2016, “The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.”  If you’re not sure you’re one of Trump’s “the people” (or Farage’s, or Wilders’s, or Erdoğan’s), the populist vision of democracy does not include you.

***

But what if you feel that vision does include you – and it is the first time that anything has? Populism is, by definition, about identity politics – a point Müller acknowledges. In a time of growing social alienation, to be offered an identity, a place in a group, even a mass-identity, can be persuasive. If Peter Fritzsche is right, we may have been here before.

Fritzsche is Professor of History at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published widely on European and especially German history. In 1998 published a book Germans into Nazis. This took a fresh look at why the Germans ushered Hitler into power in 1933. His thought-provoking book attempts to answer the question by casting aside the conventional explanations – Versailles, the Depression, reparations – and looking at the dynamics of division in a society and the desire for unity.  These explanations seem especially topical and urgent now, given current trends in Western politics.

Fritzsche’s thesis is that the First World War was crucial to the rise of Nazism, but not in the way that has been assumed. Conventional explanations have focused on the humiliation of the Versailles treaty, territorial losses and reparations. According to Fritzsche, many postwar parties opposed these; the Nazis were nothing new in this respect. If we want to understand the real role of WW1 in the rise of Nazism, we should start not in 1918 but in 1914, and look at the way it made the Germans feel one people, even though they had been that in theory for over 40 years. Facing attack from outside in 1914, Germans coalesced into what “the Kaiser called the Burgenfrieden, the “peace of the fortress”, [which] promised to resolve the divisions between workers and the middle classes, between socialists and conservatives, [and] between Protestants and Catholics.”

This was important in a divided country. Fritzsche points out that (for example) Prussian voters were divided into property classes, the highest of which were allocated votes of greater value. The popular mobilization brought people together for the first time in a sense of common purpose and resulted in an unprecedented level of civic engagement – the Volksgemeinschaft, the community working as one. A side-effect was that it meant the stratified society of imperial Germany was no longer viable. But it was not satisfactorily replaced.

The new civic engagement never went away. But in the 1920s it was expressed through a series of interest groups, and parties linked to different professional or trade bodies. It was not a substitute. When the Nazis arrived, however, people did feel a sense of common purpose. The way the Nazis did this was, for Fritzsche, far more important than Versailles or reparations, which were already the subject of political discourse. As to anti-semitism, he does not deny its existence in pre-1933 Germany, but does not see the Nazis as having any ownership of it then – all parties were somewhat anti-semitic – or find any evidence that most Germans supported anything like a “final solution”. It is the Volksgemeinschaft that is important here.

Is Fritzsche right? Perhaps only Germans can answer this, but I feel he is onto something, if only because he provides an explanation for Nazism that does not rely on Germans being a weird, separate species. After all, no human is. I know plenty of Germans. They do not have two heads. A reviewer of this book in the Jerusalem Post commented that “Historians examining nations over periods of time have somehow to find a balance between what is inherent in a people and what is not, in order to attempt explanations of national attitudes and conduct.” But can you, in fact, have such a balance – is there anything “inherent in a people”? It is an important point, as ascribing Nazism to the German character has induced a dangerous conviction in other countries that they would never behave as the Germans did. Could any historical phenomenon be repeated by any country, given the right circumstances?

Fritzsche doesn’t answer that question, and he doesn’t speculate on the broader implications of his theory. He leaves that to the reader, which is perhaps what a good historian should do. But one notes that many people in Western countries seem to feel that their sense of identity is threatened, and do not feel that any entity represents them collectively. Neither, it seems, do many Americans. In fact they seem to feel that there is no single national life, no conversation, that includes them, and few fora for civic engagement. Neither left nor right answers these concerns. In this situation, many will turn to those who claim to speak for them and against “the establishment”, and who promise to return their sense of belonging. These trends at least partly underlie the Brexit vote in Britain, the meteoric rise of Trump in the US and the growth of populist right-wing movements in Europe. If Fritzsche’s thesis is correct, could the German pattern be replicated elsewhere?

Fritzsche quotes Hitler’s dictum that the nationalists forgot the social and the socialists forgot the national. Hitler forgot neither. Given people’s feelings of powerlessness against business, globalization and a perceived loss of identity, this is an important point.

If someone says to you, “I represent you. You, the people,” you have come home. You have an identity, and have no need to share it with those with whom you do not identify, whether they be Jews, Poles, Gypsies, perceived welfare scroungers, Goths or gays. They are not “the people”. But you are. As Jan-Werner Müller explains in What is Populism?, this is the nature of the beast.  Meanwhile Peter Fritzsche’s Germans into Nazis invests the Nazi phenomenon with a universality that makes this book crucial in this time when, once again, it is the strident and divisive who claim to know who “the people” really are.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)