The link between psychology and ideology is something that cannot be underestimated in terms of its human impact, as politics is about human decisions; flawed psychology leads to flawed decision-making.
This author has written before about the disturbing links between sociopathy and political advancement. The world of politics attracts those who seek either amoral self-advancement, or those who wish to expunge their own psychological insecurities by imposing their own twisted world-view on the rest of society.
In the UK, the issue of Britain's membership of the EU was at one time something of an obsession with "cranks". Nowadays, those one-time "cranks" are in the position of holding the government "hostage", ensuring that their vision of Britain outside the EU is enacted in full.
Who are these people? What are their backgrounds and motivations? Looking at some of the more high-profile of the "Brexiteers" in more detail, a few common themes appear.
First of all, there is the fairly obvious issue that the large majority of those in favour "Hard Brexit" are Libertarians. Brexit has always been a Libertarian project at its heart, going back thirty years. It should be asked how many of the electorate would call themselves "Libertarians": 20%, if not even less than that?
The Libertarian mindset is one of strongly individualistic, anti-government (and psychologically anti-social) motivations. It is vigorously anti-Communist, against any use of government power outside of the bare minimum. This is the reason for the Libertarian sense of historic "betrayal" by the EU. As they thought in entering the EU they were entering the world's largest free trade zone, the resulting regulations and rules that then went with that, along with "ever closer union", they saw as a personal affront to Libertarian "freedom".
When a Libertarian talks of "freedom", they are talking about economic "laissez-faire" freedom: the freedom from government rules, and the freedom to trade and make money without rules. Thus the EU, in needing to have rules in order to create a "level playing field" within the single market, becomes the Libertarians' enemy. While to an objective observer, rules and regulations can be seen to have a common-sense application when dealing with a open border economy involving dozens of countries, to a Libertarian, these rules and regulations become something more sinister: a threat to the Libertarian's "freedom".
In this way, Libertarians have a highly-concrete (and personal) sense of their own individuality and "freedom", where anything that reduces their ability to act as they wish is seen as a threat to themselves personally. This explains how "Brexiteers" respond to any attempt on compromise over Brexit as anathema: having invested so much of their own time and careers to it, they "internalize" their ideology, calling those who call for compromise as "appeasers" or "saboteurs".
This violent rhetoric partially may come from the psychology innate in Libertarian thought itself, which with its strongly individualist themes also encourages an inherently aggressive, masculine world-view. This testosterone-fueled culture that comes from Libertarian thought has pervaded Western thinking, particularly in the dog-eat-dog world of the "Anglo-sphere", where inequality is seen not only as inevitable but actually a positive thing for society, and where personal "drive" is what matters in life, rather than your social background. In this way, poverty is seen as the result of personal failings rather than the result of wider injustice in society. Such a stark, unforgiving moral universe has uncomfortable parallels with even more extreme right-wing ideologies.
Where the "military" and the "diaspora" meet
A closer break-down of the people advocating Brexit reveals yet more curiosities.
Apart from the shared ideology of Libertarianism, a disproportionate number of "Brexiteers" come from military backgrounds: people like (former ministers) Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and Steve Baker have all had military careers of one sort or another, while some other "Brexiteers" (such as current minister Penny Mordaunt) have military connections through their parents.
A disproportionate number of "Brexiteers" are also what might be called part of the historic white British "diaspora": people who were either born and raised outside the UK (but also outside Europe), or have spent part of their time growing up abroad, or spent a significant part of their adult life abroad. Prominent examples include Boris Johnson (born in New York), Douglas Carswell (born and raised in Africa), Daniel Hannan (born in Peru), Arron Banks (who has significant interests in South Africa), and others.
Lastly, there is yet another disproportionately-represented segment within the "Brexiteers": those of non-white background who are also "products of empire" like some of the white British "diaspora" already mentioned. The significant trio of Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Suella Fernandes stand out here: all three are Libertarians, of South Asian heritage, and from different parts of the former colonies - Pakistan, Uganda, and Kenya-India respectively. These people are either ministers, former ministers, or powerful personages within the "Brexiteer" side of the Conservative Party.
What this all adds up to is a revealing character portrait of the motivations and backgrounds behind "Brexit". In short, what it tells us is that disproportionate numbers of Libertarians are former-military and/or legacy products (i.e. children) of the "empire".
Should this be surprising? Probably not, but being able to look at the cold, hard facts in this way certainly brings a fresh perspective on the whole "Brexit Agenda". It has been said that "Brexit" is really about creating "Empire 2.0": the "colonial" background of some of the key people involved lends itself to the view that they indeed wish to leave the EU in order to establish a kind of "Commonwealth-with-bells-on". Theresa May's current traipsing around Africa seems to support that viewpoint.
More generally, it might also be guessed that the "colonial" and military background to many of these people would skew their own view of how they see the world and Britain itself. Military people always have tended to be more nationalistic, arguably seeing their nation in a far more emotional (and personal) way than the ordinary person. Equally, those with a "colonial" background may well tend to see Britain through the eyes of mythology: their own distant upbringing taking the rhetoric of Britain as a "sceptred isle", a bastion of civilisation, all too literally, lacking the perspective that close experience of a country creates. In this way, in having a narrow (even disconnected) experience of "real" Britain, they have fallen for their own propaganda.
From a psychological point of view, they therefore invest personally in believing in Britain's unique status, becoming staunch defenders of its freedoms while ignoring its many flaws; and when they see the EU, they see an institution that threatens their own sense of Britain's mythology. As a result, they lash out at anything and anyone that threatens to destroy their own carefully-formed (and insecure) version of the world. "Brexit" therefore is about creating the Britain of Libertarians' own mythology.
The end result is that their view of Britain's place in the world is through the lens of its former imperial status and its status as a military power; by contrast, Britain's physical proximity to Europe they see more as a threat than an opportunity, skewed through the prejudice of two World Wars.
This mythology of Britain is what Libertarians are obsessed with; their own prejudice against Europe comes from their own personal background, equating EU bureaucracy with the slippery slope to Communist oppression and/or dictatorial autocracy that they may have heard about or experienced abroad. Thus they react to EU regulations as though they were the same as Soviet oppression or totalitarian methods of control. The rose-tinted perspective that many Libertarians have of the "colonies" from their parents' stories thus lead them into (masculine) fantasies about restoring British power and prestige, fueled by their own sense of having something to prove.
German parallels
This isn't the first time that ideology and a nation's fate has been guided by the fantasies and prejudice of an alliance of ex-military and "diaspora" ideologues.
Where there are "cranks" that are today Libertarians guiding Britain down an unknown and unstable path, a hundred years ago in Germany, "cranks" of a different kind were also fighting against the spread of Communism in Europe.
By 1919, Germany was in a state of institutional flux, with a weak centre of power in the aftermath of the First World War. Into the void stepped an alliance of ex-military "Freikorps"; right-wing nationalists who sought someone to blame for the mess. They then gained the trust of the German "diaspora" of the (former) Russian Empire, who began to flee from the Russian civil war to Germany: these were people of aristocratic stock (known as "Baltic Germans"), whose heritage went back centuries, to the time when Germans - then called the "Teutonic Knights" - ruled over vast tracts of the Eastern Baltic. These "Baltic Germans" were ardently anti-Communist, and had their own rose-tinted views of what Germany could look like if it were able to take advantage of the opportunity in the east and recapture its "lost lands" in the Baltic.
Into this mix was added their own prejudice. The "Baltic Germans" anti-Communism was also influenced by one of the most influential of their kin: Fyodor Vinberg. Under his tutelage, the Baltic Germans were able to influence a large part of the "Freikorps" into believing Communism was also part of a larger Jewish plot to take over the world. Thus Anti-Semitism became established in right-wing circles of German society thanks to the German "diaspora"; one of those listening was Adolf Hitler. The extreme views of those Baltic Germans went on to feature in "Mein Kampf".
Extremism can take many forms. A hundred years ago, it was the rise of Communism that led to the rise in Anti-Semitism. Today, what were once the fringe views of Libertarians have come to dominate political discourse in British politics. Their own prejudices - their irrational hatred of Europe, and their fantastical view of British exceptionalism - are leading Britain down a path where xenophobia has become normalized, and where casual violence goes unpunished.
This can't end well.
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