Rex Murphy: Results of the Brexit referendum is a rebuke to Western elites
Facebook |
Twitter |
Google+ |
Email
Rex Murphy
Friday, Jun. 24, 2016
Leave supporters on Westminster Bridge during an EU referendum campaign stunt in London. AP Photo/Matt Dunham
It’s an old concept I grant you, but nonetheless worth restating. If you want to know what people really think and feel about an issue, have them vote on it, have a referendum. It’s a principle we might want to hang on to in Canada, if it comes to changing how we vote. But for now the most firm illustration of its wisdom is the just-known results of the Brexit referendum.
The often-ignored, sometimes quite rudely deplored British people have spoken and, to the horror of enlightened opinion, respectable party leaders, the ever-guiding liberal intelligentsia, have decided they don’t want “in” the European Union. The vote comes as a mighty shock to broad-minded continentalists and supranationalists everywhere, but particularly the high elites of British politics. The Guardian’s readership will need special help — grief counsellors are already overwhelmed.
The EU vote is the most dramatic illustration to date of how the “guiding elites” of many Western countries have lost the fealty and trust of their populations. Of the gap between ordinary citizens, facing the challenges of daily life, and the swaddled, well-off and pious tribes of those who govern them, and increasingly govern them with a mixture of moralistic superiority and witless condescension.
But a decade ago, “Euroskeptics” were a slender group, derided by their betters as xenophobes and bigots, a splinter faction of regressive nationalists and illiberal tribalists. That, at least, was the approved version from on high. And from those smug heights, they dismissed with icy contempt the concerns of ordinary people that the “EU project” was draining their national identity, dissolving centuries-old democratic systems, and forcing their submission to an alien, unelected and unaccountable Brussels super-government.
Above all, they dismissed concerns about changing the nature of their country by the new rules on immigration, and the abolition of all borders between the ancient states of Europe.
The Europe-firsters of the British establishment — journalistic, academic and political — were essentially taking the hoary line of Gertrude Stein about Oakland — “There is no there, there” — and telling the broad mass of one of the oldest, most successful nation-states the world has ever seen, that such was Great Britain.
Events in Libya, and Syria, and the mass migration from the Middle East flowing from the disasters of those and other countries, continued global Islamic terror, the gruesome attacks on London’s streets, and in Paris and Brussels, too, accelerated and intensified the concern and alarm of those who saw their country drifting away from them, losing its coherence, shedding its core identity.
There are lessons here for the U.S., particularly now with the emergence of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the presidential campaign. Barack Obama shocked a great slice of the American public with his executive order (since suspended by the Supreme Court) — a pure fiat from the Oval Office — to exempt five million illegal aliens, what Time magazine described as “the largest single immigration action in modern American history.” He did this with a wave of his imperious pen. It was a decree less fit for a president than an emperor, a clear flight of that “Caesarism” which all good Obamaphiles prefer to see only in demon Trump.
Matt Dunham / Associated PressLeave supporters hold flags as they stand on Westminster Bridge during an EU referendum campaign stun
It was effected without the consultations and accommodations with a concerned electorate that should always precede great changes in a nation’s character and circumstance. Nothing gave more of an uplift to Trump and Sanders (they’ve both been riding the same wave of distrust of the governing class) than Obama’s highhanded and supercilious dismissal of working-class worries on immigration.
Obama also bears not a little blame — if blame is the word — for the Brexit vote. His inactions in Syria, his famous declaration of the “red line” and the retreat from it, coupled with the mess of his (and Hillary Clinton’s) intervention in Libya, are heavily responsible for the great migratory convulsions of the Middle East.
To cap things off, during his trip to Britain during the referendum, Obama warned that if the country were to leave the EU, in any future trade deal it “would be at the back of the queue.” This was seen both as interference and an insult. The words of a Telegraph columnist capture the sentiment this intrusion provoked: “(T)he condescending tones that Mr. Obama used (may produce) the reverse effect” from the one intended.
Indeed. There is a price for governing from on high, for being detached from voters’ expressed concerns and anxieties, and for characterizing those concerns and anxieties always as small-minded, or proceeding only from anti-liberal biases, or xenophobia and racism. Might it not also be possible that people in turbulent times, in an uncertain economy, increasingly apprehensive that their leaders are not listening to them and do not care to listen, will finally decline to follow those leaders? David Cameron has just now learned that the hard way. He has announced his resignation as prime minister.
And if enough Americans in the coming election start to feel that Washington has “evolved” into a home-grown version of Brussels, a regulation- and executive-order driven, citizen-detached administration, those citizens may choose Trump for their president. Not so much because they see him as “saviour” but as a rebuke to those “better” leaders who so scorn him. The Brexit vote is an item in a larger wave of change, one that has immediate relevance for most Western democracies.
National Post
Rex Murphy: Results of the Brexit referendum is a rebuke to Western elites
