Don’t expect Brexit to give us a British Alexander Hamilton
Ispent most of 2018 hearing the same story of revolution, ambition and factional rivalry played on a loop. And when I wasn’t listening to the Hamilton soundtrack I wrote about Brexit. I’m late to the Hamilton party, I know. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the first US Treasury secretary opened on Broadway in 2015. I only got tickets to see it in London a few weeks ago, but by then I was word-perfect on the score. For the uninitiated, Hamilton tells the story of an orphan immigrant’s climb up the social and political ladders of newly independent America, culminating in a death that … well, let’s just say it puts the modern Twitter spat into perspective. Plus singing, dancing, rapping.
The show takes liberties with the historical record but gets away with it because it is a work of creative genius. If only the same could be said of Brexit, which tells a mutilated version of a nation’s past without the redeeming features of witty rhyme and memorable melody. The comparison is preposterous but also weirdly compelling. After all, many Brexiteers truly see themselves leading an emancipation from tyranny.
Eurosceptics have always cast Britain’s relationship with Brussels as a subjugation. Initially the villains were mere bureaucrats. But what started as (mostly) metaphorical hyperbole has been turned by bellicose and dishonest campaigning into a visceral grievance. At a public event recently I heard the young leader of a pro-leave organisation
tell an elderly Indian man that her experience of growing up in Britain, as “a colony of Europe”, was analogous to his childhood under the Raj.
In its most radical conception, Brexit is a war of independence. JeanClaude Juncker is George III. Who, then are our Franklins, Washingtons, Hamiltons? Let us take the Brexiteers on their own terms for a moment. Pretend that compliance with food safety standards is an indignity exactly equivalent to harrying by redcoats. Suppose that 29 March 2019 will evermore be celebrated with fireworks as our 4 July. For this to be the case, we also have to imagine that Jacob Rees-Mogg will one day be on the five-pound note and Nigel Farage on the 50. There will be a towering Boris Johnson monument on the Mall. The collected speeches of Michael Gove will be published in leatherbound editions. Arron Banks’s cheque book will be displayed in Westminster Hall, or maybe on the Isle of Man.
But leading Brexiteers do not make convincing founding fathers. The American revolution sprang from the preceding century of Enlightenment thought. Conservative Euroscepticism isn’t a philosophy, it is a complaint. The winning side in the referendum had little hinterland of intellectual inquiry and no programme, no Rights of Man, no Federalist Papers. After victory, they organised no constitutional conventions. The candidates in the race to be the Tories’ first ever pro-Brexit prime minister tripped over each other before the first fence. Foremost among them was Johnson, whose decision to declare in favour of leave might as well have been decided on the toss of a coin. He had a back-up article announcing his support for remain. Historians have yet to unearth the draft Declaration of Dependence that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, thinking maybe his career path would be smoother under monarchy.
More ambitious literature has emerged from the lower political divisions of Europhobia. There are books by Douglas Carswell, the turncoat Toryto-Ukip MP who quit parliament when the hard work of implementing Brexit began, and Daniel Hannan, a sidelinesquatting Tory MEP who has never sought election to the Westminster parliament for whose sovereignty he crusades. Their thin volumes extol Anglo-Saxon enterprise as the essence of all global freedom. It is pseudo-intellectual Febreze, spraying a liberal economic mist to cover the smell of ethnonationalism.
And while the romantic guff about a buccaneering global Britain reeks of imperial nostalgia, I understand why its proponents furiously reject that charge. They are too young to remember the heights of empire but also they prefer the moral authority of anti-imperial struggle to the icky ethics of a project that redrew maps with white supremacism as a watermark in the paper.
Brexiteers invert imperial swagger, filtering it through self-pity and projecting it outwards as victimhood and entitlement to redress. The best view from which to observe the ridiculousness of that manoeuvre is found in Ireland, which escaped British rule and is now cast in Eurosceptic mythology as the spiteful governor-general carrying out repressive orders from Brussels. The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole calls that “the ultimate colonial appropriation”. He explains: “Britain took to itself, not just the resources of the conquered people, but their suffering and endurance. In its Brexit iteration, England audaciously dreams itself into the colony status it once so triumphantly imposed on others.”
Tory leavers have failed to sustain an optimistic account of Britain’s post-European future, so instead they retreat into a sado-masochistic urge
to re-enact past privations. This explains delight at the idea of a nodeal Brexit. There is a generation of Conservative MPs who seem perversely traumatised by the peace and prosperity of the Europe in which they grew up. As my colleague Matthew d’Ancona has pointed out, resentful at having missed out on the blitz, they crave opportunities to prove that they would have had the spirit for it. They have slipped from celebrating Britain’s record of standing alone against forces of darkness into willing a sequel.
This represents the confluence of two streams of British political culture. One is anti-intellectualism – admiring the gentleman dilettante who gets by on bluff and charm, socially superior to the sweaty scholarship boy who over-thinks and over-works. The other is moral complacency in holding up victory over fascism in 1945 as proof of eternal immunity to dangerous dogmas.
While past revolutions were driven by ideas, Brexit is strangely uninterested in them. To the likes of Johnson and Farage, ideas are a bit foreign. But Britain will not get through 2019 without some idea of what to do next. A bubble inflated by decades of pomp, ignorance and vanity will burst. The correction can come in one of two ways. The UK will not leave the EU, having collectively decided that the task cannot safely be done. Or it will leave the EU, and discover that none of the things that were promised from Brexit can be achieved without help from Europe. Both routes are painful in different ways. Either way, I don’t think future generations will be idolising the authors of our present dilemma. None of this is meant as a denigration of Britain. To the extent that any country has a national character, ours can be said to include virtues of stoicism, ingenuity, pragmatism and moderation. Those traits will help us through the coming year.
But the great achievement, celebrated by posterity, will not be Brexit but the recovery from Brexit. And the heroes will not be the Brexiteers, but the leaders who come along afterwards to clear up their mess – and without making a big song and dance about it.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist