"Brexit" is an idea based on delusions, both paranoid and fantastical.
The crowd that gathered in Parliament Square to celebrate "Brexit" at eleven o'clock on the 31st January were celebrating the victory of their own delusions. They were "free". They were free from European oppression.
What "victory" had they won? As summarized brilliantly by Tom Peck in the linked article above "what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants". Britain has become "the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up"
Brexiteers have won freedom from their own imagined nightmares. Britain has freed itself from the invisible monster. St George has slayed the dragon that never existed. England is a country at war with its own shadow, a dog chasing its own tail.
You get the picture.
In Britain leaving the EU, the EU has also lost a valuable member. As Ian Dunt says "Britain joined late, but when it did it brought something unique: a caution which is needed in any grand project. That detachment is now portrayed as a sign that Britain never fitted in. It's nonsense. Any number of European states, except for perhaps Germany, could have succumbed to jingoistic populism. We were just the only ones stupid enough to hold a referendum on it. Britain's careful approach to Europe suited it and provided something valuable to the manner in which the project evolved"
One of the EU's missed opportunities was that Britain's involvement could have been used to rein in the political urge to continually crave for more and more "more Europe", with political decisions based on pragmatisn rather than ideology. Instead, we have had the UK as a EU member whose perspective was too often under-utilized, by itself as well as other member-states. Now Britain has left, its internal politics intoxicated by its own delusions, and the rest of the EU faces a populist insurgency slowly eating itself from the inside out.
Paranoid delusions
Those Brexiteer delusions mentioned earlier have been there for decades. There is a recurring sense that these are people who could only be happy if they have an enemy, even if it is one that is entirely illusory. George Orwell said a thing or two about that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's a psychological trick that politicians have used down the ages. Technological advances have allowed them to refine their techniques, and the rise of populist rhetoric has seen the resurgence of that old chestnut, "the other". It can be any "other", as long as it can be used to take the blame.
What makes it different today is the use of "plausible deniability" by the populist leaders whenever their acolytes use that rhetoric to project harm. There's always the "nod and a wink" about populist rhetoric, from Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and all the others. If far-right violence and hate crimes are increasing, it's because of provocations from the other side, never from theirs ("there was blame on both sides" etc.). They are always "isolated incidents", except when highlighted to show how liberal society is failing. You can never argue against their rationalizing of violence, because they don't use rational arguments.
The rhetoric of division serves a purpose - to provide an "other" to aim their frusatrations at, whether it be foreign plots (the EU's "agenda") or fear of loss of culture (immigration). With Brexit, the emotive argument used has been that Britain has been "humiliated" countless times over the decades by Europe, and more generally "held back" from fulfilling its greatness.
While it's true that joining the EEC was originally a decicion based on the changing global strategic situation, the kind of "deal" that Britain has got out of it over the decades has been one that has involved various "opt outs" compared to other member-states (on Schengen, the social chapter, the rebate, the Euro etc.); in fact either proving Britain's more advantageous "exceptional" status with the bloc, or the ability of Britain to get more than should deserve. Either way, to other European countries, Britain's complaint of "bullying" by the EU looks like the complaints of a country with a dire lack of self-awareness.
The British print media have much to blame for this sense of eternal paranoia, or "Europhobia". The culture of pychologically equating "Europe" with the Second World War - also thanks to films and TV series - has led to Britain, and England in particular, with a sense of greivance against "Europe" totally out kilter with reality. The sense of the EU being a co-operative project is lost to them, with "Europe" used by David Cameron when it was necessary to prove his Eurosceptic credentials to the hardliners in his own party. The EU became the "whipping boy" of the British psyche, which ended with Cameron being eaten by the monster he couldn't stop feeding.
By the time of the referendum, the EU was being blamed for almost everything possible: from illegal immigration from the Middle East and Africa, to the closing down of factories in the North-east of England. Nothing was the fault of Britain's own government, if it could be conveniently blamed on the EU.
Fantastical delusions
Similarly, Brexit supporters often sound like they ought to be sci-fi/fantasy aficionados. The vision they have of Britain outside the EU is one where Britain is able to transcend global rules and norms.
In the same way that they fantastically blame the EU for holding Britain back for decades, they claim that "Britannia Unchained" can become a 21st century buccaneer: using language more commonly found in sci-fi fandom, they claim that Britain can be a pioneer in the tech industry (as though no other country has thought of it before), or can become a "supercharged" leader in space technology, for example. Why not build a Britain space fleet to colonize other planets, for that matter? Money is no object to them. No ambition seems too fantastical to hold.
Likewise, Brexiteers live in a world of 21st century make-believe; a fantasy realm where borders are frictionless even though there are no agreements in place to allow it. The Britain they imagine is one where the geographical reality of the country's berth right next to Europe is forgotten; instead of it being mere practical, financial and logistical sense to do the bulk of our trade with our neighbours, Britain should be imagined as a country where it is as logistically simple to trade with Australia as it is with Austria.
Britain, in their eyes, is not tethered to Europe by geography at all, but is in effect a giant floating island, like "Laputa" in Gulliver's Travels, able to move around the world and trade with whom it wishes at will.
All this is imagined because of emotional ties to the past. If these fantastical delusions are not permitted to happen, then it is the fault of Europe, or a conspiracy to "do down" Britain from within. Then the paranoid delusions take over to cloak the fantastical nature of their imaginations. These people are, emotionally-speaking, mere children in adult bodies.
Brexit Britain is a country fuelled by the infantile instincts of a nation that has yet to grow up. Boris Johnson is, in this sense, the leader to a cult of age-regression.
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