Well, not so much trahison really...entirely predictable if you are as cynical about academics as I am. I found them open-minded, fair,even 'objective' in their own subject areas, but naive mouthpieces of (petty) bourgeois ideology for anything outside.
So it was for Brexit. Prof R. Tombs is the exception ('Robert Paul Tombs is a British historian of France. He is professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge'). He has bravely stuck to his pro-Brexit guns, produced various articles and broadcasts, at least one book (This Sovereign Isle), and founded and contributed to Briefings for Brexit/Britain
He has a post in the lates Briefings.. summarising some of the extraordinary reactions of most British intellectuals and academics. I have noted some of them in this blog too (see Europe in the Imaginary 2017). Tombs's earlier work,including his book, takes on the view of English exceptionalism, arguing that the proportions of voters not supporting the EU in the UK was pretty constant, and was about the same as those in France, Italy, Spain, Holland and even Germany (it might be even higher now). However, '"Europhiles" seem oblivious of attitudes and developments in Europe'
[There was after the Referendum] consternation, grief, anger, alarm....[with Brexit as ] ‘among the worst of the current worldwide horde of nationalist populisms’[according to Prof Garton Ash]...The intelligentsia, from actors to academics, participated volubly in the national quarrel. They were overwhelmingly Remain (nearly 90 percent of academics, for example). Over-representation in the media, especially the BBC, gave them ample opportunity to stoke controversy.
The issue was too complex for the electorate. It was too difficult, some declared, for democracy itself: when the wrong people formed the majority it was mere ‘populism’. Leave voters were dismissed as ignorant (‘low-information’), poor (‘left behind’), bigoted, and gullible dupes of the tabloid press, the Russians, and ‘silver-tongued demagogues such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’ (Garton Ash again).[5] Leavers were anyway old: depriving the young of their promised land, ‘driven by nostalgia’–this became a key Remainer theme—’for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’, in the words of the Liberal Democrat party leader Sir Vince Cable.[6] It became common to describe Brexit supporters as ‘gammon’. Many would soon die, so their vote was invalid, and should be cancelled or re-run. If both sides sometimes used inflammatory language, only that attacking Leave voters was biological.
This overwhelmingly hostile reaction to the vote was not based on a positive case for EU membership...they were ‘anti-Brexit’ rather than ‘pro-EU’, and had little to say about the EU itself....The many publications that have appeared since 2016—several by established academics, prominent novelists or well-known media commentators—nearly all share the assumption of English exceptionalism: that England is different from all the other ‘Europeans’. This is the main unifying thread of what I would call ‘anti-Brexitism’....Voting Leave, they thought, must be an English psychological aberration, not a rational political choice...Fintan O’Toole, saw ‘the Brexit psychodrama’ as a product of ‘the English reactionary imagination’.[13] He proposed as evidence the success of the sado-masochistic novel Fifty Shades of Grey
...nostalgia became the favoured explanation of Brexit: especially nostalgia for empire and/or for the Second World War....Bernard Porter, emeritus professor of Modern History at Newcastle (for whom Brexit supporters, when not moved by ‘plain stupidity’, are fascists) takes a similar view in Britain’s Contested History. His fundamental assertion is that Britain is uniquely obsessed with its past
Vice-chancellors collectively spoke of their corporate interests. Much emphasis was given to EU research funding, although the UK in fact contributed more that it received. When historian Sir Noel Malcolm worked this out from the rather opaque official statistics, the University of Cambridge repeatedly declined to publish his findings.[
Not all British intellectuals were anti-Brexit. ...The leading Left-wing political philosopher Perry Anderson wrote a series of long and excoriating attacks on the EU...He summed it up as ‘dilute sovereignty without meaningful democracy, compulsory unanimity without participant equality, cult of free markets without care of free trade.’
...writers of fiction were certainly no better at understanding what was going on around them. Not all admittedly were as blindly angry as the novelist Ian McEwen...A gang of angry old men … are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth....Jonathan Coe (a winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Prix Médicis and the Costa Book Award) wrote Middle England, a novel in which nice people were Remainers and Brexiteers were old, bigoted and manipulated by sinister forces
There is no strong connection between the EU and anti-racism, ‘decolonization’, trans-genderism, ‘green’ radicalism, and now pro-Palestinian activism. But this set of issues has in common with anti-Brexitism the rejection of traditional identities and sentiments....The anti-Brexit intelligentsia rejects what it thinks Brexit stands for: namely, a popular revival of the nation state, condemned as archaic, absurd, xenophobic, racist, and ‘White’. John Gray comments that ‘the progressive mind detests national identity with passionate intensity'
Tombs ends this well-argued piece with this:
There is a final irony. Anti-Brexitism has become itself a form of Left-wing populism: it is, as the journalist Tom McTague puts it, ‘an easy and ultimately populist explanation for Britain’s current woes.’[45] This reflects the failure of most intellectuals to understand the Brexit vote, or more precisely their refusal to do so. In consequence, as the EU turns increasingly to the populist Right, as the disadvantages of EU membership become clearer, the British Isles are turning to the populist Left, in the belief that Brexit has failed.
Do read the original piece!
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