Social polarisation, red walls and bat signals: how social science helped make Brexit and Boris Johnson

Everyone knows who won Brexit. But not everyone knows how. Behind the Rasputin-like manoeuvring of Boris Johnson's master strategist Dominic Cummings, lies an entire strata of respectable British political science which has all too readily conceptualised, mapped, measured and confirmed the new political alignment and its consequences that Cummings (and others) carried to victory in the UK in June 2016 and December 2019. Presenting a Bourdieusian spin on the mainstream public opinion scholarship that constitutes the field of "Brexitology" and its powerful doxa, this talk offered an alternative explanation of Brexit and after that may have significant parallels elsewhere where "populist" insurgence has shaken the foundations of "liberal democracy."