At the heart of the deep social and political divisions that plague Western democracies lies a disturbing individualism. The core of supremacists who incubated Brexit from small circles at Eton and Oxford thought of a country that only existed in their utopian minds.
Of the fifteen prime ministers from the War to today, eleven studied at Oxford, a campus with medieval roots that grants some three thousand bachelor's degrees each course. The strength of democracy is its representativeness and legitimacy, while its weakness is ignorance and irresponsibility. Martin Wolf, one of Europe's leading journalists, has published a lucid essay titled The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, where he exposes the risks of a generalized tendency in many liberal democracies to opt for competent authoritarian governments. He maintains that a dictatorship is rarely competent but can potentially be much more dangerous if it manages to compete with democracies in doing a job well done at the cost of deprivation of freedoms and applying criteria dominated by the State's control over citizens. It can fall into authoritarian governments that emerge from the polls but lead to right-wing or left-wing populism.