The issue is the issue
The NYT has an interesting article showing how Brexit has split British society right down the middle, as people lose their best friends and stop speaking to family members:
“It’s definitely visceral, it’s definitely nasty, and there are certainly people who won’t accept the core of the other person’s position,” added Mr. Fraser, who thinks that his support for Brexit in London, which generally voted the other way, cost him friends.
At one level this is kind of surprising, as Brexit is not a very important issue in substantive terms. I believe it will lower Britain’s RGDP a couple percent and Brexit supporters think it will raise GDP by a few percent. But lots of other issues also impact the economy without stirring this sort of passion. Yes, Brexit might affect immigration, but I doubt it. The UK already has the ability to control immigration from non-EU countries and nonetheless decided on a high immigration policy. The next government will likely be Labour, and they certainly won’t sharply restrict immigration.
As far as cultural change, the only immigrants affected are from other EU countries, whereas it is immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean that have the bigger impact on British culture.
While I opposed Brexit, it’s just not that important. For God’s sake, even Norway and Switzerland are not EU members!
Just as it’s a mistake to look for American explanations for Trumpism, it’s a mistake to look for British explanations of the Brexit civil war. The NYT story would apply just as well to the governorship of Scott Walker in Wisconsin, which split apart the good people of that formerly “nice” state. A few months ago I did a post on Poland, which noted a similar phenomenon. There are dozens of other examples.
Earlier in American history, the issues were far more important but people did not take them so personally. You might object that Vietnam and civil rights tore the country apart during the 1960s. Not really. At a certain level, the political right knew that the left were the good guys (albeit a bit too idealistic). The right might not have wanted blacks moving into their neighborhood and they might not have wanted a defeat in Vietnam, but they understood that protestors had a point. Everyone knew that blacks had been treated shamefully and the Vietnam War was a misguided adventure. Lots of Republicans participated in forcing Nixon from office. Things were nowhere near as polarized as today. (The old TV show “All in the Family” accurately captured the mood.)
Unlike in the 1960s, the right is no longer ashamed of its views, and is willing to state them publicly. They are in a mood to fight back against the smug condescension of elite liberal opinion. After the Vietnam War, things quickly got back to normal in America. Today’s splits (which are occurring in countries all over the world) will take much longer to heal. Social media has helped to create two tribes.
When I used to be a professor, there was a joke about faculty senate debates being so vicious because they involved such trivial issues. In the modern world, the political debates aren’t about consequential issues like workers’ rights, civil rights, war and peace, etc. No one seriously expects Trump to do anything about illegal immigration, trade deficits, etc. Today’s debates are about symbolic issues. It’s as if half the population decided to pick a fight with the other half, just as an aggrieved spouse that had built up years of resentment suddenly lashed out at their partner over some trivial issue—forgetting to do the dishes.
While Brexit itself has only a trivial effect on the UK in utilitarian terms, the Brexit debate might be the biggest blow to the UK’s aggregate utility since WWII. It is reducing happiness on both sides.
The real issue is the issue itself, not what the issue is about.
PS. Here’s something else that’s lurking the background. For the first time in human history, most voters are older (above 50 in the case of Brexit). And they are increasingly getting their way, all over the world, to the dismay of the young.
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10. March 2019 at 08:15
I can’t recall anything recent as blatant a public statement as the Southern Manifesto of 1956, nor the speeches of George Wallace or others of that time.
It’s true that party polarization has increased, but that’s mostly because party membership is less decided by ancestry (including whose side your family fought on in the war), ethnicity, and class, and more by political views than it used to be. The exception that proves the rule is noting that on the whole the nonwhite members of the Democratic party are more likely to vote for the moderate establishment than the ideological white party members.
10. March 2019 at 08:16
In the 1950s and 1960s we had whole states where the differences between Republicans and Democrats were that Republicans were Protestants and Democrats Catholic, with little to do with most political issues of the time, instead with political issues of their parents and grandparents generations.
10. March 2019 at 08:23
“Brexit is not a very important issue in substantive terms.”–unless you happen to live on the island of Ireland
10. March 2019 at 11:00
John, I remember the 1960s and 1970s, and people weren’t divided by politics like they are today. When you went out on a date, it didn’t much matter whether the other person was a Democrat of Republican. It’s different today.
Yes, people disagreed strongly on certain issues, and the issues were more substantive back then, but it wasn’t personal.
Cove77, Fair point. But it’s England where the polarization has recently ramped up.
10. March 2019 at 11:06
Though I think any explanation for Trump must be primarily American in nature (because Trump was already leading in GOP primary polls in early 2011), I agree the viscerality of the Brexit debate can’t just be attributed to a UK-only explanation (though the British press is substantially more dishonest and corrupt than most other in the world, which is certainly a contributing factor). Too much like the 2016 U.S. presidential/2018 Hungary election swings.
“he NYT story would apply just as well to the governorship of Scott Walker in Wisconsin, which split apart the good people of that formerly “nice” state.”
…no? Walker was quite popular among WI’s rich. Brexit isn’t.
“Social media has helped to create two tribes.”
Only by way of TV.
@John Thacker
Bingo in all respects. 1960s and 1970s were very polarized, though not party-sorted. Just look at the 1964 and 1972 elections.
10. March 2019 at 11:10
I believe there is a typo: and Brexit supports think it will raise GDP by a few percent.
I think it should be ‘supporters’
10. March 2019 at 11:36
“Friends” who split over such an issue, weren’t friends in the first place.
Maybe that has more to do with you growing up in Wisconsin?
How often do you go out on dates today? I still go out and it doesn’t matter.
Okay, I think that was contrarian enough for today.
10. March 2019 at 12:59
“When I used to be a professor, there was a joke about faculty senate debates being so vicious because they involved such trivial issues.”
Yeah, the old “narcissism of small differences” thing. In one of his Palliser novels, either Phineas Finn or Phineas Redux, I can’t remember which, Anthony Trollope does about 20 pages (maybe it just seemed like 20 pages) on it as applied to UK politics – when the Whigs and Tories have real differences, they get along as gentlemen, but when they don’t, they spend all their time (e.g. Parliamentary discussion time) calling each other horrible names.
If you’ve been reading any left-wing blogs over the past 10 years or so, especially ones with any Pom (Limey, whatever) readers or writers, compare the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Brexit to the tranquility wrt 25% unemployment rates in the PIIRGS! Left-wingers have really become the “more government” team in many respects; look at all the now non-stop enthusiasm for the use of fiscal policy, where of course “fiscal policy” means more spending, really, not lower taxes.
10. March 2019 at 16:12
I’m beginning to think that any political activity beyond voting should be heavily taxed due to all the negative/zero sum things involved…
10. March 2019 at 16:51
The fact that there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of religious denominations with sizable numbers of adherents implies that none of those denominations has very strong evidence in its exclusive favor. The same is true of most political differences. It makes no sense to sacrifice friendships and familial harmony over beliefs that rational people can easily disagree on. Most of us would never dream of breaking up friendships or families over differing religious beliefs. Why do so over political differences?
10. March 2019 at 17:25
Oh Scott I think you are missing the real core of it. The issues are anything but trivial and they are quite dangerous: Who should have access to a nation’s most attractive women? Should a man pay taxes if he can’t start a family? Is nationalism going to be legal? What is the responsibility of women to the future of a nation’s people? Should people who don’t pay taxes be allowed to vote? Should Islamic no-go zones be allowed to continue?
These are extremely serious issues and I doubt they are going away anytime soon. Maybe Brexit wasn’t about precisely these issues, but then again the voters didn’t get the chance to vote on these issues.
Should ethnically British people have special rights in Britain? If not, should they be allowed to separate WITHIN Britain and rule themselves? If ethnic Brits want to live with their kin but are legally barred from doing so, should they be expected to continue to have loyalty to the British state? What if they are one-issue voters and that’s ALL they care about?
I hope all these problems get ironed out and that rational calm prevails.
10. March 2019 at 18:17
Kgaard,
what a bizarro, paranoid bric-a-brac. What’s “ethnically British”? Isn’t it supposed to be the “United Kingdom” precisely because it’s not “ethnically” “pure”, right? Not to mention the Anglo-saxons first “invading” these Isles taking them over from the original inhabitants… then getting pushed out themselves by the Normans as far as Byzance, of all places… with all these invasions from East to West and right back, I’m all getting lost about who’s originally ethnically anything at all… ah well, what else is new.
10. March 2019 at 18:46
MBKA … There was minor deviation in UK DNA for like 1000 years up until the 1960s. You can take one of those 23 and Me tests and it will tell you British Isles but have trouble getting more precise than that. British DNA has a pretty tight distribution. Jimmy Page is a dead ringer for Gordon Brown etc etc.
10. March 2019 at 21:11
Kgaard,
VERY cursory search of “UK DNA history” (1 search, first entry opened) paints quite a different story:
https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/international/press-releases/DNA-of-the-nation-revealedand-were-not-as-British-as-we-think
Specifically, the interregional variability seems quite high… as expected.
The real issue I have with reasoning from ancestry though is this: on one hand, the current world wide debates about immigration appear to be clearly motivated by cultural fears (as opposed to, say, economic ones). But then, the reasons given against immigration immediately turn quasi biological. I say “quasi” because a) cultural aspects are also often mixed in, especially about religion, b) it is seldom as clearly asserted as you just did, that ethnicity supposedly makes a country, probably because it is so untenable. Either way, if it’s cultural then assimilation will fix everything, and if it’s ethnic then we have to draw and redraw a whole lotta borders and engage in endless civil wars. Can’t really have it both ways.
Note, one of the most British people I’ve ever met, in culture, beliefs, lifestyle, work ethic, accent, diction, you name it, is an ethnically Mauritian-Indian-Chinese woman from London. No I am not making this up. Oh and she’s Muslim.
11. March 2019 at 03:18
@Jeff
I think the NYT article is mostly fake news. Rare anecdotes sold as universal trend, as so often in journalism.
@mbka
Maybe unrelated but I saw a show named “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” few weeks ago. It’s about ancestry and genealogy of public figures.
For example they had George R.R. Martin on the show, and they told him you are this percentage Irish, this percentage British, this percentage Jewish, this percentage Not-Italian (he thought he was part Italian but he wasn’t). It was really scary. I was surprised that they would do something like this but they seem to do it with everybody.
I was even more surprised that this is even possible, because the other side of the spectrum is always telling me that something like this is not possible at all, since we are all one human race, and that there’s no genetic difference between “races” and “ethnicities”. So which is it???
11. March 2019 at 04:02
I take pointed issue with this post, and I am personally offended.
People who disagree with me are uninformed, stupid or corrupt.
11. March 2019 at 04:10
OT but big stuff:
“On falling neutral real rates, fiscal policy, and the risk of secular stagnation
Lukasz Rachel and Lawrence H. SummersThursday, March 7, 2019”
The above paper is an A-bomb.
Summers says monetary policy won’t work in the modern world, and negative interest rates very risky.
Gotta go fiscal, but can’t build up debts to high. Yeah, both options bad.
It looks like Summer is leading up to money-financed fiscal programs, but then he doesn’t pull the trigger.
11. March 2019 at 05:02
Why is Brexit a big deal? Because it won.
Why is Trump a big deal? Because he won.
The counterfactuals here probably produce stories about how wonderful, or at worst neutral, everything is. Why? Because the press is super-majority liberal and it tells the stories.
I don’t want to normalize Trump. He is — like George Will said — our shabbiest President. However, the hysteria, and the deep, deep, deep, deep, deep polarization is overwhelmingly the work of the liberals.
11. March 2019 at 05:20
Christian List,
interesting, and honestly, I find a lot of these labels “x % this nation” and “y % that nation” silly too, precisely because modern nation states do not map neatly on ethnicities. Sometimes, this is even reflected in conflicting nation state names: “Deutschland” / “Tedeschi” relates to the Teutonen tribe, “Germany” / “Germania” maps to the Germanen tribe, “Allemagne” maps to the Alemanni tribe. Very few European nation states are ethnically homogeneous. If I had to guess I would put the Hungarians on top, descendants of the Huns. Everyone else had massive admixture from endless migration.
Ethnicities themselves tend to be proxied by some isolated markers and that is also a source of error.
The best way to look at it is by genetic distance or variance. For example, the variance in African genomes is so great that some random African is at a further genetic distance from another random fellow African, than s/he is from the “average” European. Hence the statements that you are referring to, that “race” is a problematic concept. There is definitely no “black” race for example, because color of skin is such a random feature that appears in many radically different ethnicities, inter-African, Indian, austral-melanesian, what have you. Even Europeans appear to have “lost” the “black” gene only in the Neolithic, I read somewhere recently. But, say, Africa contains many ethnicities that are very different from one another. So while the idea of a black race makes no sense, the idea of various African ethnicities does make sense. It’s the lumping together into “races” that is problematic.
Statistically, averages only make sense if they derive from a single population, normally distributed. Due to massive admixture, we don’t really have that in natural populations.
11. March 2019 at 07:05
I want to zero in on your Wisconsin comment, because the argument there was indeed of substance – reining in the cost of public sector health and pension benefits. Time will tell, but unless Walker’s efforts are undone, his efforts promise to redound to the significant benefit of the state.
Compare neighboring true-blue Illinois, which had its pension reform effort gutted by the state supreme court, and just saw a roly poly failson billionaire spend $160 million to get elected Governor, who just released his plan to jack up taxes without even thinking about the spending side of state finances.
11. March 2019 at 07:10
Scott,
When you say that Brexit is not an important issue in “substantive” terms, you mean in terms that economists think of, i.e, dollars and cents. But homo sapiens has been clashing, fighting and dying over “nonsubstantive” issues (by your definition) since the beginning of recorded history. Human beings as they actually are–as opposed to how economists think they should be–care intensely over issues of national identity like those at the heart of Brexit. (And not just the British–try explaining the American Revolution as a rational response to the absurdly light taxes that London had actually imposed).
You can keep complaining that humanity in general is too concerned with issues you think are irrational, or you might consider that the “rational behavior” model on which economics is predicated is an inadequate explanation of how human beings actually behave.
11. March 2019 at 08:12
@Jeff: religious differences break up or prevent families all the time. There are many, many people who refuse to or are not allowed to marry outside of their faith. Others will excommunicate a child who converts to another faith.
11. March 2019 at 08:18
@Scott H. – wrong, and in fact your comment proves how bad the polarization is. Your team can’t see how they are part of the problem, and the other team can’t either. If you don’t remember how much Obama Derangement Syndrome was a thing (as well as Clinton DS), then you are just as bad as the other guys who don’t recall Bush DS or don’t think there’s such a thing as Trump DS.
Sumner’s point, which is correct, is political differences did not derange people as much back then. It wasn’t as personal. Maybe for some, but not as many as today. And yes social media is a big reason why.
11. March 2019 at 08:25
@Ed: good point. Brexit and Trump voters certainly were not being very rational when they voted. It was (and is) all about the feels. As it is for the other side too, for the most part.
Nothing wrong with it if people don’t take it so seriously though. Back before politics got so personal, most people voted for the candidate they liked most, or for the ticket their parents did, and then went about their lives. Today every vote is the most important in history and we spend all day on sites like this (or the more social ones) relitigating every vote and wallowing in the differences.
11. March 2019 at 09:40
Ed … Yes that is spot on.
11. March 2019 at 10:28
Scott – I am sorry but you definitely have “Economist Magazine Syndrome”. That is you read a newspaper or magazine article about a country and then believe you can provide an informed opinion on that country. The Polish article is another example to go with this UK one. You should be more skeptical. Anecdotes by journalists (especially ones with axes to grind) are not data. I have had the privilege of working in many countries across the world (7 so far) for extended periods and generally speaking the foreign press analysis of a particular situation is shallow at best, usually driven by some agenda relating to the foreign journalist’s home country (either proving or disproving some local political agenda) and often simply wrong. I am willing to bet money that most people in the UK spend vastly more time and passion discussing the European cup potential of Manchester United under their new (old?) Norwegian manager than Brexit.
11. March 2019 at 11:26
Thanks Alex.
Kgaard, I’m not fixated on ethnic purity. Maybe that’s one reason I opposed Brexit.
Scott, You said:
“the deep, deep, deep, deep, deep polarization is overwhelmingly the work of the liberals.”
Yes, the right elects a troll as president and it’s the left’s fault that there is polarization. Okaaaay.
Brian, I don’t disagree with that, but my comment was on how Walker split the state in two, drove people to stop talking to each other. That’s completely new for Wisconsin, and it obviously wasn’t just caused by pension reforms.
Ed, That seems consistent with what I said; not substantively important but symbolically important. Yes, I care less about those things than others do, but I do understand that other people care about identity.
ChrisA, That’s wrong, I also form my impressions from talking to people all over America, and in foreign countries. I do not just rely on the media. I’ve heard many similar stories in conversation, first hand.
Having said that, I agree that media stories are often misleading, but I suspect this one is reasonably accurate.
11. March 2019 at 12:02
Scott … One way to think about political changes now is that people are getting a lot MORE focused on race as it becomes evident that people overwhelmingly vote their DNA. If you can look at a picture of someone (and know whether they are single or married) and be able to tell 80% of the time which way he/she is going to vote, that tells you that voting is about DNA and marriage more than anything else.
This was not commonly understood even 10-15 years ago. But it is now. Hence the changes in what people care about politically.
11. March 2019 at 12:03
“Yes, the right elects a troll as president and it’s the left’s fault that there is polarization.”
Because polarization was definitely not a thing when the non-trolls were running the place back in 2014. Oh, wait…
11. March 2019 at 12:59
Scott,
Your last point has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m 33 with 3 kids and another on the way, and my biggest fears for their future quality of life relate to skyrocketing rent, education, and healthcare costs and environmental harm (air pollution and possibly climate change).
Yet everywhere I look I see boomers desperately clinging to the policies that have brought us to where we are now – overregulation, exclusionary zoning, occupational licensing, bloated and unfunded state/local pension benefits, etc. I fear the only hope for my kids is for them to run a horrible rat race for the first 10-15 years of their careers in an elite profession and scramble to the top of their cohort. But the bottom 80-90% of the next generation seems seriously screwed.
11. March 2019 at 13:14
Scott, The Wisconsin rancor, including the legislature fleeing to Illinois and a recall election, was 100% about pension reform (or, more generally, reining in the power of public sector unions). What else do you think it was ‘obviously’ about?
Anyway, no such rancorous split down the middle here in Illinois. We’re all good, sliding happily into oblivion.
11. March 2019 at 14:28
So if Brexit is no big deal for Britain, what is?
According to the same logic the American Revolution was no big deal for America because it was only about a few taxes.
11. March 2019 at 14:40
@Christian: not even close to the ‘same’ logic. Brexit is a sovereign nation leaving a trading bloc. The AmRev was a colony breaking away to form a new nation.
11. March 2019 at 15:39
@mskings
Such fake news. You know exactly that the EU is so much more than a simple trading bloc.
You mean: Britain might be a sovereign nation again after leaving the EU.
@mbka
Sounds good, doesn’t work. At least not all the time. Today there are even special drugs, only for certain “races”, for example blacks.
11. March 2019 at 19:19
Christian List,
“Sounds good, doesn’t work. At least not all the time. Today there are even special drugs, only for certain “races”, for example blacks.”
This statement of yours actually goes to the heart of the matter. African Americans that were sold as slaves into the Americas came from a fairly circumscribed region of Western Africa. And there would have to have been some serious selection effects – many did not survive the voyage and the treatment, and there was significant admixture with “whites” too. On average, African Americans have about 75% African ancestry. Yet, you conflate their ethnic origin and current genetic mix into “blackness” as if any dark-skinned person had the same origins. It’s a fundamental attribution error. So yes, there are a lot of statistics / drugs / statements about “blacks” , and virtually all of them are about “mid 20th to early 21st Century African Americans”. Black skin per se doesn’t mean a thing for ethnicity. It is present in many, many radically different ethnic groups. Not one soul, not even SJW liberals, acknowledges the enormous heterogeneity within “blacks” – or “whites” or “Asians” for that matter. The “Asian” moniker is especially hilarious since it would apply from Siberia to Sri Lanka and from Beirut to Jakarta… clearly not passing the laugh test for a “race”.
Back to “black”. Do you seriously believe that statistics or drugs meant for African Americans do apply to Indians just the same just because they are just as dark? To Australian Aborigenes? To Ethiopians, who are from a totally different area of Africa? To lump all of these into one “black” race just because in the American mind “Black” equals “The kind of person that was sold for slavery into the US”? Does it get any more absurd?
12. March 2019 at 08:49
@Christian: equating Brexit to the AmRev isn’t even fake news. It’s just stupid.
12. March 2019 at 09:13
SG, Good point. But just to be clear, the two generations older than boomers are even more reactionary than boomers.
And old people are less susceptible to the siren call of socialism.
Brian, Walker became a polarizing figure for many reasons, including pension reform. But perhaps you have a point; the debates in Wisconsin had more substance than those in the UK, which are more symbolic.
Christian, Wow, there must be a vast difference between Norway and Sweden. I never noticed that before!
12. March 2019 at 11:10
SG: “I fear the only hope for my kids is for them to run a horrible rat race for the first 10-15 years of their careers in an elite profession and scramble to the top of their cohort. But the bottom 80-90% of the next generation seems seriously screwed.”
I’m not sure why this is such a common notion among all age groups. Your children will be in their 20s in the 2030s and early 2040s where A.I. will have been ramped up several notches and all major diseases cured with a radically slowed aging process for everybody.
It won’t be utopia and there will be plenty of suffering from 2020 to 2120 but the health and wealth of kids today will be unrecognizable to their baby boomer grandparents.
12. March 2019 at 11:23
@Todd K: Actually LOL’ed. You’re not just out there on the bleeding edge of techno-utopianism, you’re actually baffled why everyone else isn’t as nuts as you.
Here’s a hint, if you aren’t sure why something is ‘a common notion among all age groups’, or basically everyone else, it might be because you’re a lunatic.
12. March 2019 at 11:47
It *is* baffling!
Every American generation has become richer and healthier than the one before it but for some reason this will soon stop or reverse right at the cusp of coming health pills, stem cell therapies, cancer therapies, Alzheimer avoidance and much more advanced A.I. Gee, that makes sense.
Oh, did you see the latest NR (Niagen – Vitamin B3 derivative)/pterostilbine trial results? ALS patients who tookthose for a year actually showed some mild improvement on average whereas the latest drug approved by the FDA in 2017 only slowed the progression of the disease by 30 percent.
The drug costs $140,000 a year; the NR and pterostilbine supplements cost $2,000 a year. Pretty cool, eh?
(This is the same supplement Dr. Christian List mocked a few months ago. more trial results are coming.)
12. March 2019 at 12:08
@Todd: Actually that progress has stalled, which is what makes your utopian certainty even more risible. Millenials are less rich than their parents at the same life stage, and life expectancies are slowly falling.
There might be some breakthrough stuff coming, but your blithe certainty is childish. Most likely progress will proceed incrementally as it almost always does.
12. March 2019 at 15:19
As substance retreats, status expands. And status is a zero-sum game.
For example, a lot of the PC migration advocacy is about stripping status from the indigenous working class.
When Kissinger, when asked by academic politics was so vicious he replied “because the stakes are so small”. But the status element is very large.
12. March 2019 at 15:34
Childish? Tell that to the scientists working on health pills (NMN and NR are just the beginning and a small part) at over 400 lifespan research centers around the world. Add cancer therapy, gene therapy and stem cells to those as well. You just aren’t following this at all. (I understand that the NBA is more important.)
Which progress has stalled? Nothing I mentioned has. It’s better to have read a little in an area before commenting, right? You don’t see me commenting on NGDP targeting.
Of course all of this has been incremental. Again, if you had been reading about this, it would be obvious to you.
The millennial are much better off than the baby boomers.
12. March 2019 at 16:26
msgking, You said:
“Millennials are less rich than their parents at the same life stage,”
I’ve never once met a millennial who wished to trade places with us boomers, as we lived back in the 1970s. Not after you describe to them the living conditions back then.
12. March 2019 at 16:40
Scott,
I don’t know much about Sweden and Norway, and I bet neither do you.
What I read is that the EU forces Norway to adopt about 90% of their laws 1:1. Furthermore, they force Norway to pay billions to the EU. So that would explain why Norway and Sweden might be similar. But since when do you support coercion and extortion?
I know something about Switzerland and Germany. Those countries are quite different, even though their Alemannic German background is similar. I wonder why you picked Norway instead of Switzerland, especially since you love to pick Switzerland on other occasions so often.
But don’t worry the Moloch EU does everything in its power to subject Switzerland more and more as well. Didn’t you oppose bullies until recently?
@msgkings
I don’t think it is. I read quite some libertarians who say AmRev was mostly about stupid taxes. Taxes that were even quite low at that time. So what they say is, that it wasn’t worth a war at all.
Brexit is about the same things: Taxes, representation, democracy, self-government, getting back control over your country. It’s basically about the exact same things as in AmRev – just without the war. It might sound stupid in your ears but try to take a step back once in your lifetime.
I’m a millennial myself, nevertheless my impression is that quite some millennials are pretty ignorant and spoiled brats. Maybe not more than in all the other generations, but also not less.
“Less rich”? I highly doubt that. It’s like Scott says: Today it’s way better than in the 70s, and this is true for nearly everyone.
12. March 2019 at 21:23
Christian List,
“Taxes, representation, democracy, self-government, getting back control over your country.”
All of the above are red herrings as regarding Brexit. EU membership actually confers more freedom to the individual, and to business, than non EU membership: the freedoms of movement of goods, capital, services, and people, in a larger environment than anyone’s more limited country of origin.
The added EU taxes are minute (all Eurocrats together, reportedly, sum up to the administrative force of a midsize town). The regulation from Brussels simplifies overall regulatory burden by standardizing it among countries (which is why Brexit Britain intends to keep / mirror EU regulations anyway).
Central negotiation of trade deals, regulation, standards, etc., through ONE team working for xx countries has huge economies of scale over doing it all for a single smaller country. Producing and trading freely for 500 million people has huge economies of scale over doing it just for a few million. Wonder why the US is richer than most of Europe? The larger common market has something substantial to do with it.
Democratic representation is through the EU parliament, where your voice is heard or ignored the exact same way as in a “national” government.
Self government, what does that even mean? Instead of being pestered by far away Brussels over a few general rules, more local governments pester you just the same over many more detailed rules (ask the Swiss if you don’t know what I mean: democracy is orthogonal to freedom & local government can and will regulate when and what color you paint your house). I don’t see the moral difference between more local and less local government. They all have the same in-principle problems and none are more “mine” than the other, as long as I can vote for them. No government is “self” except by the sovereign individual. Countries are being called “sovereign” but that really only applies to their governments. Everyone else has to do whatever the government wants them to. “Sovereign” of course, originally applied to a king only.
The EU concept by contrast with the four freedoms is as neoliberal as it gets for anything in Europe, especially with competition as a guiding principle. This is now being weakened but it was a sheer miracle that it had been a major EU principle in the first place. The EU is about freeing people from their national governments. Without the EU, you get more state (the local kind), not less. Yes, your problems will be more local in origin, but you won’t have any less of them, nor will you have more control. When people swoon about “our country”, they really swoon over a corporation (the government) tasked with maintaining roads and public order, regulating what people can and cannot do including preventing them from moving around places, and whose composition they have no influence over save for voting for the CEO every 4 years, their voice being diluted by a factor of 5 to 50 million in the process.
Useful reading, “The people’s romance”, here: http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_10_1_1_klein.pdf
13. March 2019 at 10:43
Christian, You’ve just changed the subject to the question of whether the EU is a bully. I think it is. But aren’t you proving my point? If the UK leaves, they will become even more of a bully, as the UK was trying to restrain them.
13. March 2019 at 18:40
Scott,
That is the age-old question of whether to abandon an abusive union or if it’s better to hope that there will be internal reforms. It is the question of whether the wife should leave her alcoholic, abusive husband or wait for a miracle. I think she should leave.
I agree with you that the UK was really restraining the EU in certain areas. The UK was an important balancer.
But have there been any positive reforms in the right direction in recent years? In my view, things got worse. Even with the UK as part of the EU, you could not see much difference in recent years .
Now Macron’s France is completely dominating, which is really bad news for Europe. Nevertheless, I can understand the decision of the Brits. Ultimately, the EU is not reformable but broken beyond repair.
But don’t worry, I think the Leave show of May is just that: an act. I assume she doesn’t really want to leave from the very beginning but she’s too afraid to tell this her voters.
At the end of the day, when the dust settled, the usual suspects will come forward and announce: Sorry, we’ve done everything to make Brexit happen, it just doesn’t work out.
17. March 2019 at 11:05
Christian, If the UK public does not reverse their decision in a second referendum, it will happen. But it won’t be what the naive Brexiteers promised.