Brexit, Post-liberalism, and the Politics of Paradox

Shaping the modern world with a stone-age brain: Brexit and the Moral Foundations Theory

“…reasserting national sovereignty through Parliament. The subtext was that a dictatorial, and unelected out-group had neutered the in-group (Pabst, 2016). The Leave side built the claim that ever closer union, and centralisation, would make the EU less answerable than national governments, eroding the connection between voters and political decision making.…”

Corbynism and Blue Labour: post-liberalism and national populism in the British Labour Party

“…Rutherford, an academic and advisor to risen and fallen stars of the dormant Labour right like Chuka Umunna and Rachel Reeves, admirably contributes to ongoing attempts to take Corbynism seriously as an identifiable set of ideas. But, we suggest in this paper, Rutherford's posing of a stark choice between the two does not sufficiently address how both tendencies express wider philosophical points of convergence on the contemporary left around so-called 'post-liberalism' (Pabst, 2016a), the nation, the people and how each relates to the state. Selling readers on the assumption that there is no alternative, this obscures the true extent to which it is possible to articulate a real political-philosophical alternative to both Blue Labour and Corbynism based in a countervailing set of ideas sourced from within the left but not presently among its mainstream: a 'critical Marxist' alternative we begin to delineate in this paper.…”

“…In Blue Labour this comes as part of a wider attack on abstract 'rights' against supposedly more 'concrete' lived forms of responsibility and reciprocity. Abstract rights are associated with liberal global capitalism's 'abstraction from embeddedness' (Pabst 2016b), to which a nationally-defined system of 'covenants' based around 'substantive rather than merely procedural justice' (Pabst, 2016a) is posed as the alternative.…”

“…Both Corbynism and Blue Labour, in their own respects, reject liberalism and embrace the possibilities of a new 'post-liberalism' (Pabst, 2016a). This defines itself against that which is transactional, abstract and commodified, seeking to reinstate divergent visions of a close national community in their place.…”

Sentiment analysis using TF–IDF weighting of UK MPs’ tweets on Brexit

“…9 The data shape was 185970 x 13250, and approximately 19 GBs in size. [45] that the normal political division of left-right is not applicable to Brexit, as this issue transcends party politics, while in [46] it is argued that Brexit is a populist movement with support from both Government and Opposition. We find Brexit is highly polarised as explained below.…”