Screenshot from Poltergeist, by Stephen Spielberg. Youtube.Brexit, a crisis of economy, culture, identity, belonging – a crisis of the past, the present and the future, now becomes a constitutional crisis. It’s not just that Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have gamed the system for their own personal and political ends – it is the system.
Brexit was weaponised from the get go by both sides keen to go to war and win the spoils – no matter the collateral damage to our political culture and society. All that mattered was beating the other side. It’s the only thing that matters in our adversarial, winner takes all, tribal system and it is killing our politics. More than anything, the crisis it took Brexit to finally surface is revealed as a crisis of democracy.
More than anything, the crisis it took Brexit to finally surface is revealed as a crisis of democracy. Over decades our politicians have refused to heed the signs of this democratic decline. Instead of managing the tricky tensions, paradoxes and compromises of a complex twenty-first century society, our democratic system marginalized and humiliated so many people, for so long, that on that fateful day of June 23, 2016, they took their revenge. People who have been overlooked, left dispirited, desperate and angry, when presented with the voting equivalent of a ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ moment, did exactly that. We now live in the shattered slivers of that climatic moment.
