Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Still some yachts out on moorings, but the dinghy park is filling up with above-my-head hulls laid up for Winter. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism.
Defined by the first search result as "a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite". Maybe. Or is it the assertion of that power rather than a belief in its existence? And maybe, given the endless wittering of news journalists and analysts, we should work "a talkative elite" into the mix. There's an all-too-frequently spoken assumption that a second referendum on the EU's membership of the EU would reverse the result of the first, which I doubt. And how does "best of two" work, anyway?
Even now, there seems to be a not-quite-articulated assumption that "the gentleman [sic] in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves," as the politician Douglas Jay wrote in 1937 (before voting against EU entry in 1975). Thanks, Wikipedia. Except that I don't think that's quite the issue. The term "silent majority" can't mean much nowadays, given how many of us are online, but there does seem to be a divide between the talkative elite and the rest of us.
The silent majority were once the dead, then Richard Nixon co-opted the phrase to convince himself that while a lot of people were rioting and demonstrating against him, a silent majority were staying at home and agreeing with his conduct of the Vietnam War. These days, maybe there's a meaningful distinction between some kind of a self-defined elite that takes for granted its own correctness - by now, all those Leave-voters must have realised they were wrong and we were right so let's hold a second referendum - and the rest of the "ordinary people" (as BBC reporters describe the crowds at national events) who vote the way they want to vote without reference - or access - to any kind of collectively generated "higher" wisdom.
Life seems to educate some of us to believe that we can lead the "national conversation" (my turn to co-opt a phrase). We go into politics or the news media; we engage in some other way; we just keep ourselves informed, take an interest, whatever it might be. In doing so, I suspect, we run the risk that the conclusions we draw will turn into assumptions that we apply more widely than they merit. And it's very easy to forget that the status quo is even less of a guide than the past to what will seem normal in the future.
Ronald Reagan for president? Come off it - he's an actor.
Defined by the first search result as "a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite". Maybe. Or is it the assertion of that power rather than a belief in its existence? And maybe, given the endless wittering of news journalists and analysts, we should work "a talkative elite" into the mix. There's an all-too-frequently spoken assumption that a second referendum on the EU's membership of the EU would reverse the result of the first, which I doubt. And how does "best of two" work, anyway?
Even now, there seems to be a not-quite-articulated assumption that "the gentleman [sic] in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves," as the politician Douglas Jay wrote in 1937 (before voting against EU entry in 1975). Thanks, Wikipedia. Except that I don't think that's quite the issue. The term "silent majority" can't mean much nowadays, given how many of us are online, but there does seem to be a divide between the talkative elite and the rest of us.
The silent majority were once the dead, then Richard Nixon co-opted the phrase to convince himself that while a lot of people were rioting and demonstrating against him, a silent majority were staying at home and agreeing with his conduct of the Vietnam War. These days, maybe there's a meaningful distinction between some kind of a self-defined elite that takes for granted its own correctness - by now, all those Leave-voters must have realised they were wrong and we were right so let's hold a second referendum - and the rest of the "ordinary people" (as BBC reporters describe the crowds at national events) who vote the way they want to vote without reference - or access - to any kind of collectively generated "higher" wisdom.
Life seems to educate some of us to believe that we can lead the "national conversation" (my turn to co-opt a phrase). We go into politics or the news media; we engage in some other way; we just keep ourselves informed, take an interest, whatever it might be. In doing so, I suspect, we run the risk that the conclusions we draw will turn into assumptions that we apply more widely than they merit. And it's very easy to forget that the status quo is even less of a guide than the past to what will seem normal in the future.
Ronald Reagan for president? Come off it - he's an actor.
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