Still under that volcano.

The jarring combination of absolutely pristine spring weather and a national emergency reminded me of something the other day. Viridian foliage, crystalline skies, working from the back steps in glorious sunshine, a massive financial crisis, no aeroplanes – of course, I’d been here before. It’s eerily like the weeks following the Eyjafjallajokull eruption back in 2010, not just because the skies are empty, but because the same kind of people are shouting the same things at each other on the Internet.

Very quickly, a well-defined school of thought appeared that argued (oh, how they argued) that the whole thing was a lot of old nonsense. An example of how everyone was risk-averse these days, scared of their own shadows. A lot of them seemed to really struggle with the idea that a threat you couldn’t see with the naked eye might actually endanger something as reassuringly salient as a Boeing 747. They tended to have a down on “experts”, be men of a certain age who liked big cars, and to be either grumpily dismissive of “computers” or else to be software libertarians.

This should of course be familiar; it’s the core constituency of Brexit. The word “gammon” in its political sense hadn’t been coined yet, but although we didn’t have the word, we had the thing in some profusion. There was something like an identity there, with a social base if not one defined by economics, and if not an ideology, at least a collection of style tropes, tactics, and fashion statements. Over time, this group seems to have found coherence in choosing denialism of pretty much any issue that comes up. In 2010 they were already climate deniers, but they almost instantly discovered that they could deny the effects of volcanic glass accumulating on turbine blades too, something they patently hadn’t given a thought to five minutes previously, and these days they pretty much deny that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a problem.

What there wasn’t, yet, was a parallel political identity in opposition to it. Today, though, that exists and its stereotypical expression is enduring FBPE Twitter. If the gammon side have had enough, famously, of experts, the other lot can’t get enough of experts and like nothing more than to denounce someone for not respecting expert opinions. Although the practice of putting academic honours into your bio started off with feminists, it spread like wildfire here and now there’s an overwhelming surplus of Doctor or Professor Bloke.

So, there’s one defining division right there – an attitude to what the Americans call “credentials”. A big part of Brexit, notoriously, was performatively jeering at expert advice, and a big part of FBPE culture is about performatively submitting to it. This has interesting psychological consequences; the gammon side tends to meet success with triumphalism and failure with narratives of betrayal or just bumptiousness, while the FBPE side tends to meet successes with complacency and setbacks with panic. If the expert advice hasn’t worked, where do we go from here?

Both sides keep something nasty in their respective woodsheds, and the nastiest thing in both is probably entitlement. The gammon side is convinced that it suffices to deny a problem hard enough to solve it, somewhere between a triumph of the will and a triumph of hope over expectation. The FBPE side, memorably, wanted to activate the Queen, something of an ultimate expression of Karen wanting to speak to the manager. If they could complain loudly enough the experts would be back in charge.

The next nastiest thing, though, would be what happens if the manager won’t speak. Something that kept coming up was always that completely nonsense story about people calling the police because they couldn’t get KFC – a classic piece of fake news, as neither of the police forces who publicised it could confirm ever receiving such a call, but one that resonated. Catastrophising was and is a big part of FBPE style, and stories or rather fantasies of social fragility play a big role. This is a case of what is known as elite panic, the phenomenon of the well-off and respected panicking in the face of adversity and projecting their panic on the masses. It’s never pretty. Without the guidance of the experts, the mob will rage. This, I think, played a similar role to the Brexit habit of jeans-rubbing fantasies of violence, with the difference that the imagined violence was outsourced.

In this case there weren’t the means to do more than just buy a hell of a lot of toilet paper but it seemed to both stoke the panic and also add to a fundamentally unserious attitude to any effort at serious organizing or preparation, something which the Brexiters, of course, also had in spades. Although people like the West Yorkshire remain campaign were able to organize well enough to bring major demonstrations to London, the national remain campaign groups were a fiasco right up there with David Davis’ folders.

In Max Weber’s terms, the Brexiters wanted to double down on charisma while also fantasising more than was healthy about the means of violence, while the FBPErs hoped that somebody else – the experts – would do the real work of Weber’s administrative staff. Both sides were united in their entitlement and their refusal of responsibility, Weber’s cardinal virtue. There was a reason why neither side were much interested in a workable compromise.

(This post started as this Twitter thread)