but the risk is that they are perceived to be undermining democracy and ignoring the will of the people . It worked for the nationalists . The trouble for them is that they argued that leaving would cause a recession , job losses , interest rate rises , an immediate recession , lower consumer confidence etc etc . They are being proved wrong in every respect . That is OK , because we are living in a postfact world . They should keep moving the goalposts . No recession ? Well we didn ' t technically mean recession , and we meant it would happen in the near future and not right away . Shit like that . As many postmodernists argued , perception is reality . It ' s about how people feel . And western liberal values are going to take a worse brutal beating in 2017 than they did in 2016 , if people don ' t realize that you can ' t fight postfacts with facts .