Leave & Remain Pathologies

I'm an ardent fan of Vlad Vexler on YouTube. Vlad is a UK domiciled political philosopher who primarily analyses the Ukraine War and what's going on in Putin's Russia, but he does have other strings to his bow.

Recently he analysed the pathologies prevalent in the Leave and Remain camps surrounding Brexit and came up with 3 pathologies on the Remain side and 2 on the Leave, leaving aside the pros and cons of Brexit itself. 

I've teased these out into 3 on each side, as I believe he condensed two of them into one. They're not ubiquitous, by any means, just prevalent, especially on Twitter.

For Remain:

Remainers have a teleological view of history - seeing progress in one direction only, rather than how it actually happens - in fits and starts with occasional setbacks and reverses. They see Brexit as a disaster, whereas it's a temporary situation that can and probably will be reversed.

Dealing with stereotyped and idealised caricatures of opponents, such as lumping them all into the Gammon camp. Reasons for voting Leave were nuanced and many were genuine, based on personal circumstances.

Remainers generally fail to recognise centrist politics contributed to, or did not address, feelings of marginalisation and de-prioritisation among Leave voters, particularly with regard to immigration and refugees. An open doors policy is not logical nor intellectually sustainable, yet Remainers generally fall into the trap of defending just such a policy, rather than arguing for sensible caps on numbers. They feel they have to oppose, diametrically, anything the Leave camp comes up with.

For Leave:

Magical thinking - a refusal to engage with cause and effect, involving a disregard for evidence, logic, and complex causal relationships, such as the Gravity Model of Trade. They believe that merely stating something will make it happen, not taking into account that a path has to be mapped out to get from A to B, and that path has to be feasible without breaking democratic institutions. So many have fallen for undeliverable promises.

Failure to acknowledge that the people who led Brexit are (or have donors who are) an entrepreneurial and exploitative cohort of populists who are actually in favour of globalism and immigration for personal gain, the latter as a means of reducing business costs, and they are therefore incapable of delivering Brexit in the manner those who voted Leave hoped. Essentially, they were lied to by the few who gambled that they would to gain massively from market shifts.

Failure to understand that if institutions have to be broken to gain an objective (breaking the law, rewriting the law in a foolhardy manner, or breaking sacred, democratic and constitutional conventions), it's impossible to rebuild those institutions once the objective has been realised - they will remain irreparably broken, to the overall detriment of democracy. What's good for the Tory goose is also good for the Labour gander.