The Brexit sword no longer hangs over my head
The moment EU citizens living in the UK learned about the vote to Leave on 24 June 2016 seems similar to historical moments of collective shock. Like for the assassination of JFK and the 9/11 attacks, many of us will still remember vividly where they were, or what they were doing, when they learned the UK had voted to leave. It will become a flashbulb memory that I and many others will never forget.
I recall well how I woke up very early in the morning on that day, and I asked my husband to go and check for me, as I was too nervous to look. I worried the result might be Leave. He went downstairs, came back up and said "Leave won". That short sentence "Leave won" was to dominate my life in the three years to come, from roughly 24 June 2016 to 17 August 2019.
During those three years, I would check the news compulsively, the shocks of each new revelation or policy was unable to numb me. I woke up and went to bed with Brexit hanging over my head.
In the story of Damocles' sword, the courtier Damocles trades places with the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse, to get a taste of what it's like to be powerful. As he sits, drinking the finest wines and eating the choicest foods, a sword hangs above his head, held by a single horse hair. Such, the story goes, is the plight of the powerful. The sword hanging over my head was not the sword of power but of powerlessness. Though I was a resident of the UK and had a stake in its future, I was given no voice in the decision process, and the only way to vote was to vote with my feet. When I discussed the situation with UK citizens, many were sympathetic about my insecurity of a continued right to stay, but others said it was after all my choice to come to the UK, and that it would all be sorted out in the end. I didn't trust it, and so looked for positions elsewhere. I was offered a wonderful position in the US.
After about five months in the US I can say that the Brexit sword is gone. It no longer hangs over my head. Obviously, I still sympathize and feel bad for my friends in the UK (both UK and non-UK citizens), but the difference of not having that constant sense of threat lifted from me has proven to be a strange experience.
I no longer wake up and go to sleep thinking of Brexit. Instead, my mind has made room for other things. It is incredibly liberating. I read the news maybe once every few days. The stream of bad news is unrelenting, but it seems that my Brexit experience has finally managed to numb me to it to some extent. For example, I felt surprise, but not the dread I would have felt if I still lived in the UK, at the size of the majority with which Boris Johnson won.
Why is my ability to care about Brexit suddenly gone, now the Brexit sword no longer hangs over my head? Should I not care anymore because my family and I are no longer personally affected? Isn't that just selfish? My inability to be so much emotionally invested as I was feels like survivor's guilt.
My Brexit experience has taught me that there’s no substitute for direct experience. There’s a reason why women’s rights movements were and are headed by women, why Black Lives Matter is headed by black people, and why citizen right groups for EU citizens in the UK are headed by EU citizens in the UK. If you are directly affected, it changes your perspective. Indeed, it would be strange if Black Lives Matter were not headed by black Americans, or if men would be leading women's movements. Your own lived experience colors your views, and makes you prioritize. This is cause for optimism: perhaps most people aren’t as xenophobic as their voting record seems to suggest. They can just afford not to be as emotionally invested (this is not to say that lack of concern is innocent — it can still be a moral failure).
A solution to the problem of the irreplaceability of direct experience is to make sure that political decision making and debate takes into account a variety of perspectives. Now, this is not the case — it is not so by design. The first-past-the-post system in the UK ensures that a narrow slice of the population (only those who can vote, so who are of age, British citizens, etc) can decide what the entire society needs to do. This relies on what Elizabeth Andersen calls a consensus model of democracy. But such a model will only take into account a narrow range of interests. She cautions that it puts "pressure on and even coercion of dissenting minorities".
The situation is even more dire, as we currently also have the rise of far-right rhetoric which is currently inoculating westerners in various countries (including the UK but also Hungary, and Poland) to show empathy with various minorities. Mainstream parties, in an attempt to keep their voters, alter their policies and proposals to be more in line with the far-right. This tactic is proving very successful for Boris Johnson, whose Brexit policies seem barely distinguishable from the demands of UKIP a few years ago.
All this makes democracy reflect less and less the "will of the people", because who counts as "the people" gets narrowed down from the get-go.
If we want a society that better reflects our diversity of concerns, we will need something else than this winner-takes-all mentality. Particularly, as José Medina argues, oppressed minorities can due to their unique perspective bring valuable insights to society as a whole. Rather than marginalizing them and silencing them, societies ought to listen to them.
I am no longer an EU citizen in the UK. I'm now a foreign worker on a work visa in the US — this leads to a different perspective, and different concerns. This perspective is valuable. According to the recent discourse in the UK and many other western countries, my perspective is less valuable than that of native-born citizens, who feel left behind and whose "legitimate concerns" (I am putting this in scare quotes deliberately) have been ignored. I disagree. Immigrants are an integral part of UK society and they won't go away. It is politically advantageous to use disenfranchised people for political gain and ignore their concerns. But to do so risks missing out on their perspective, and thus misses the opportunity to make society genuinely democratic, with concern for all.
