The British elites cannot continue to ignore the masses:
Somehow, over the last half-century, Western elites managed to convince themselves that nationalism was not real. Perhaps it had been real in the past, like cholera and telegraph machines, but now that we were smarter and more modern, it would be forgotten in the due course of time as better ideas supplanted it.
That now seems hopelessly naive. People do care more about people who are like them — who speak their language, eat their food, share their customs and values. And when elites try to ignore those sentiments — or banish them by declaring that they are simply racist — this doesn’t make the sentiments go away. It makes the non-elites suspect the elites of disloyalty. For though elites may find something vaguely horrifying about saying that you care more about people who are like you than you do about people who are culturally or geographically further away, the rest of the population is outraged by the never-stated corollary: that the elites running things feel no greater moral obligation to their fellow countrymen than they do to some random stranger in another country. And perhaps we can argue that this is the morally correct way to feel — but if it is truly the case, you can see why ordinary folks would be suspicious about allowing the elites to continue to exercise great power over their lives.
It’s therefore not entirely surprising that people are reacting strongly against the EU, the epitome of an elite institution: a technocratic bureaucracy designed to remove many questions from the democratic control of voters in the constituent countries. Elites can earnestly explain that a British exit will be very costly to Britain (true), that many of the promises made on Brexit’s behalf are patently ridiculous (also true), that leaving will create all sorts of security problems and also cost the masses many things they like, such as breezing through passport control en route to their cheap continental holidays. Elites can even be right about all of those things. They still shouldn’t be too shocked when ordinary people respond just as Republican primary voters did to their own establishment last spring: “But you see, I don’t trust you anymore.”
Brexit is Britain’s Trump, but it’s a much healthier response to the “elites” (they’re not particularly elite in matters of knowledge or competence) than ours has been.
I’m in favour of Brexit because I think the EU is wasteful and unnecessary, countries don’t need to marry each other for there to be free trade and tourism.
I doubt the cost to Britain would be significant, though there could be a childish backlash from the Europeans. There’s a lot more to the world than Europe so Britain was silly to sacrifice building on Her relationships with the rest of the planet to accommodate Europe.
I think Brexit is helpful but not sufficient, as they’ll still have Parliament filled with people who will dutifully ape EU mandates on everything from environmental policy to labor laws.
As for the Remain campaign and its ineptitude and desperation, Obama flew over and stuck his foot in, and he polarizes any issue he addresses. It’s who he is and what he does. If you had him address the Irish troubles you’d have the IRA shooting mothers in the back of the head inside of month. Instead he hectored Britain about how stupid they would be to leave the EU. No doubt he sent many of his top political consultants to the leave campaign, just as he sent his best campaign people to unseat Netanyahu during the last Israeli election. They have a toxic touch.
I disagree. Standard practice in the UK when they want to pass a law they know would piss off the electorate is to go to the EU and convince them to send back a regulation that requires them to pass the law they wanted to pass in the first place, while denying all responsibility.
Get the EU out of the loop, and they’d have to pass the laws themselves. Which would be much harder.
“If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
people who are like them
That actually seems racist to me and I think it misses the point. People don’t want others telling them what to do, especially when they make rules they have no control over.
Members of the same country don’t have to be alike to not want others controlling their lives.
It doesn’t have to refer to race. For example, the British, French, and Germans have fought a lot of wats against each other over the centuries. National identity is about culture, not skin color.
The concept of a united Europe is not without merit, but the member States surrendered far too much to an unaccountable central bureaucracy. Though it certainly doesn’t help that many of the member States themselves exercise burdensome levels of control over their subjects.
I always wondered how they expected a superstate to work without picking one common language to teach every schoolchild and use in official business. English is to a large extent the default anyway, but it could be Estonian or Esperanto as long as people were serious about it.
No, …the idea, from the start, though denied, was to have that central bureaucracy in control everywhere in Europe. It goes back to WW1. The bureaucrats in both France and Germany, by the end of WW1, pretty much controlled their respective economies by diktat, justified by “there’s a war going on, get in line!” They found they liked that a lot more than they’d thought they would. The people who did not like it kept France and Britain from that for the next 20 years, while Germany fell into the hands of the Nazis and their “Organization Todt”, which looted Europe through the end of the war.
After WW2, many of the same French and German bureaucrats were still in position to push through the European Coal and Steel Community. That was worked, by bribing enough businessmen and parliamentarians, until it became the European Economic Community. The EEC was eventually able to bribe enough voters through multiple schemes like the “Common Agricultural policy” and others, to get the European Union accepted by 1992.
Past reincarnations of the Roman Empire were always attempted by conquest, whether it was the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, or the Napoleonic Empire, or Hitler’s attempt. All of them failed, because military conquest was interfered with from outside. Britain was often the key factor.
Bribery of key portions of the British and other polities, backed by incremental extension of “progressive” statism in the schools, promoted the idea that the EEC had worked as an alternative to communism, and the EU would work better. This substitution of bribery for conquest to build the next Roman Empire worked until it succeeded. Then the demographic results of statist society began to bite. The bureaucrats, with the help of their political allies, turned to immigration to ignore that drop in productive citizens. This, however, is only part of the problem with the EU.
The basic problem is that they have run out of German bribe money to keep the elites in each polity happy. The Brits know that after Germany is tapped out, they will be next in line as a source of bribe money, and want no part of it. Brexit is the beginning of the unravelling of this attempt to re-establish the Roman empire through bribery. It may take another 30 years, but the Beast is dying, again.
If anything, the EU’s unaccountable central bureaucracy is even worse than our own. Especially in election years, we hear so much about the 537 elected politicians in Washington, DC. If anything, they represent the Hollywood (for ugly people) Government. The real federal government is the goat’s breakfast alphabet soup of bureaus, departments, agencies, and whatnot. They’re ran by a vast, unelected, and almost completely unaccountable hord of bureaucrats. They’re referred to as the Civil Service, but far more often than not, they’re neither civil nor do they provide a service. They’re parasites on society. If Trump wanted to garner a lot of support, he could champion the idea of civil service law reform to make them accountable and fire-able for their actions (or inactions). The bureaucrats aren’t going to vote for him, anyway.
If Trump really decides to get down to work as president I think it’s really possible. Wouldn’t that be awesome!
The worry is Trump’s critics are right, that he’s lazy and it’s just about him. I think those critics are discounting real substance that exists in Trump. It will be interesting to see either way.
If Hillary gets elected we don’t have to wonder.
I think those critics are discounting real substance that exists in Trump.
There is nothing to discount.
Still far better than Hillary.
Well they voted themselves out of the EU!
Good for them! They do not want to lose that which is “British” Or “English”. Their culture is a fabulous culture which has enriched the world in countless ways, and is worth preserving and strengthening.
Same with the US culture…..it is extraordinary and should be respected, preserved, strengthened.
I am still tentative with Brexit. I worry about the unity of nations. We should not destroy the established good relationships between counties.