Introduction to BJS special issue

The articles in this issue were all commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the UK’s Brexit referendum result in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 to present a rapid sociological response to the challenges and questions posed by these tumultuous events. Ostensibly these are two very different kinds of political events. The Brexit referendum in the UK was an unprecedented popular vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, whereas Trump was elected as a Republican candidate during the usual cycle of presidential elections. Notwithstanding the prominence of politicians such as Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, Brexit was not focused around specific individual leaders, whereas the figure of Trump himself looms indelibly large in the American case. Brexit will be bound to have huge long-term constitutional implications for the UK, whereas Trump’s victory might have less fundamental consequences. And yet, there is also a clear sense of resonances between these two political events. Some of these resonances are superficial. Both were ‘radically unexpected’. The media, political institutions, and what might be termed ‘public opinion’ – at least of the liberal commentariat – was shocked by the unexpected results. They thus both speak to what might be termed the collapse of a certain kind of ‘liberal political rationality’, in which the political ‘rules of the game’ were well established and could lead to generally predictable outcomes within normally expected limits. Both Trump and Brexit can be seen to mark the eruption of new kinds of social forces, previously excluded, into the political arena in powerful, visceral and protean ways. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, elitism, marginality – issues which had previously been shooed away from the formal political arena, even though they continued to bubble ferociously in the political sidelines – erupted with remarkable force. The term ‘populism’ has sometimes been used to label and define this moment, but this is currently a loosely defined, and possibly inappropriate tool for this purpose – as several of the papers in this issue discuss.