Brexit: The Victory of Nostalgia Politics
By: Rafae Qazi
Tags: Brexit, Baudrillard, Politics, Nostalgia, Philosophy

A society without power suffers a panicked nostalgia over its loss. A nostalgia that refuses to subside in a mourning that refuses to end. Nostalgia, the most potent political force, aches its citizens to return to an imagined past uplifted by time; when Britain ruled the waves, when we were all Huckleberry Finn. How can one contend against a political opposition that represents its citizens childhood earnestness, where time has decayed all but the crystalline nuggets of joyous memories. Such was the failure of the Remain campaign and all other economic based narratives that sought to quell the populist tide.

They assumed people’s fascination with fact where really our motivation is by fantasy. The fantasy of sovereignty in a globalised world ruled by capital markets, the fantasy of authority when the two most charismatic Presidents have been actors (Raegan by profession, Trump by personality). Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. Our Prime Ministers and Presidents aim to project it, not to exercise it, for power has long been dispersed to an eco-system of technologists, financiers and marketers. Yet there has never a greater collective demand for signs of power. How eagerly we waited for our Prime Minister to appear on the podium to reassure us the Plague could be contained. In our most vulnerable moment we craved for reassurance whether it be hollow or whole. The demand for signs of power overwhelmed what it could reasonably produce.

Brexit succeeded by appealing to these two forces; the demand for signs of power and the nostalgia that arose due to its real loss. When our high streets were populated by betting shops and our factories were art exhibition centres, glamorizing the ghost workers, a sense of decline was internalised but never expressed or honestly admitted. How desperately we clung to the title of ‘5th largest economy’ when in reality food banks fed our children. The simulacrum of prosperity was more important than prosperity itself. Britain, even if she was not, must be Great, for admitting otherwise would lead to pain and helplessness. Similar to how the Americans believe in their Dream, even it can only be realised in their sleep, we must take solace in statues of Nelson and Trafalgar — decline hurts, admitting decline hurts more.

The failure to reveal the international chains of rules and order that drag us to our miserable prosperity has also created a citizenry aware of their existence yet ambivalent of their need. Hence the cry ‘Take Back Control’ enjoys such mass appeal; it takes us to our imagined uplifted past and allows us to fantasize a lossless transition. It is also why Brexit should be destined to fail, it realises your dream in the cold room of reality. Like your heroes who you should never meet, Brexit would have best been the ‘one that got away’ but it is dangerously here and realising the loss to real prosperity should wake us from our nostalgia. I do not believe this will happen.

For an objective analysis the premises that motivated an act and the consequences of it must exist in a linear continuum where there is dialectic polarity. There is no agreed set of premises that motivated Brexit, for some sovereignty, for some the NHS, for most different motivations at different news cycles. Moreover COVID has muddied the potential for any clear conclusions that could be drawn from it; everything is endogenous. However these are analytic concerns. The real Mordor of Brexit analysis is social media, it has suffocated dialectic polarity leaving us to listen only those who we can tolerate and as for the time, what day is it?