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Have the Right and Left Converged?
To my surprise, and somewhat to my puzzlement, the American right seems thrilled by Brexit. And so does the American left. For very similar reasons. Indeed, the reasoning seems so similar that it’s hard to tell the editorials apart: If you didn’t know the ideological leaning of the publication, you wouldn’t be able to guess. Broadly, both right and left think this represents a blow against globalization; the proper comeuppance for pointy-headed elites, academics, bankers, and journalists; a victory for people everywhere who think immigration is out of control; and a rebuke to European snobs. I think all of that’s incorrect — and both sides are wrong — but help me to understand what’s going on with the American right that it sounds the same, these days, as the left. Perhaps we’re not as polarized as we think?
For evidence that they sound the same, here are some recent opinion pieces about Brexit. Try to guess if the author is right- or left-leaning:
- The failure of the economic arguments to sway the vote may spell the end of economic rationalism which began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It may be that the vote against the EU was in part a protest vote against the long term changes in economic structure of the UK economy which has destroyed many working and middle class lives. … Insofar as the decision represents a retreat to economic nationalism and closed borders, it may highlight the diminishing appeal of globalisation. Free movement of goods and services, lowering of trade barriers and cheaper foreign labour has not benefitted everybody. Conservative American politician Pat Buchanan’s observation in Pittsburgh Post Gazette on 3 January 1994 remains uncomfortably accurate: “ … it is blue collar Americans whose jobs are lost when trade barriers fall, working class kids who bleed and die in Mogadishu … the best and brightest tend to escape the worst consequences of the policies they promote … This may explain … why national surveys show repeatedly that the best and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues … ”
- I am enjoying the tantrum of Britain’s elites as much as anyone. From listening to the BBC on the radio, it seems like Britain’s fanatically pro-EU elites are building an alternative universe where they ignore survey research that shows little support for a second referendum, and instead focus obsessively on anecdotal stories about Leave voters begging forgiveness from bankers and professors. Forgive them oh Chancellor Merkel, for they know not what they have done. …
- I’ve been watching the TV coverage to get my fill of MSM reaction. And what you say of [Gillian] Tett [of the Financial Times is typical of what Lambert rightly labels the credentialed class — that 5% (some would put it higher at 10 or even 20% but I think the real paid-up members of the credentialed class are in that bracket) who explain to the proletariat what the elites are doing and Why It Really Is In Your Best Interests — they are simply struck dumb. There’s something you don’t see every day.
- Most of all, Brexit is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s, whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has just about served the most populous parts of the country, while leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline. Look at the map of those results, and that huge island of “in” voting in London and the south-east; or those jaw-dropping vote-shares for remain in the centre of the capital: 69% in Tory Kensington and Chelsea; 75% in Camden; 78% in Hackney, contrasted with comparable shares for leave in such places as Great Yarmouth (71%), Castle Point in Essex (73%), and Redcar and Cleveland (66%). Here is a country so imbalanced it has effectively fallen over …
- Yes, Brexit was a rejection of Thatcherism and the rest of the neoliberal twaddle … but that doesn’t mean Scotland would actually be better off in 2020 in the EU separate from UK. …
- Stafford, Cannock, Wolverhampton. Different towns, same message: “There’s no decent work”; “the politicians don’t care about us”; “we’ve been forgotten”; “betrayed”; “there’s too many immigrants, and we can’t compete with the wages they’ll work for”. Nobody used the word humiliation, but that’s the sense I got.
- The current panic reveals a clique of embedded London journalists. The debate, such as it is, has been entirely antagonistic, veering between scaremongering and sanctimony. Often I wonder who is being addressed. A lot of us are not. … When people say: “Why is my pay so low? Why can’t I get a doctor’s appointment? Why is there no school place?”, the answers cannot merely be abstract nouns such as “austerity” or “globalisation”. We may as well blame the weather.
- Brexit is an expression of English — more than British — nationalism and is part of a decades-long decline in British unity. But the England that wants out of Europe is the England of vanished industry in the north, rural poverty in the southwest and people clinging to middle-class lifestyles in the suburbs of once-great cities that feel increasingly alien to them. Scotland has shuttered factories of its own, of course, but frustration at that fueled Scottish nationalism. English nationalism was reinforced by resentment of Scottish nationalism. But it grew and took on a populist character in reaction to real problems that seemed to have been brushed aside by many leaders in all major political parties. Brexit is a rejection of “Cool Britannia,” the 1990s branding of a cosmopolitan, creative and united Britain as a part of a happy vision of globalization.
- The Remain campaign tried to tamp down this anger with lectures, talking down to the rubes in the backwoods and explaining how they didn’t know what was good for them. This has been pre-eminent rhetorical technique among globalization enthusiasts for decades: that they would fix everything if the public would only listen. What they have fixed is a transition of wealth into financial centers and corporate coffers, and a denuding of societal character in favor of a global monoculture …
- A restless, beaten-down public has drawn the first blood in a rebellion against a neoliberal economic orthodoxy committed to globalization that has sucked the life out of whole communities and blighted the future of a generation. …
- The nerve of the leader of one of the world’s oldest democracies to actually let the voting public decide the future of the nation. … Cameron surely would have been much smarter to follow the lead of the political elites in other countries and to ignore the rising hostility to a union that seems to be stifling progress rather than increasing prosperity for all. Instead, he committed the unforgivable sin of allowing democracy to function, a debate to be held, and voters to choose. In doing so, Cameron has opened a Pandora’s box of insurgency against the political elite in Europe.
Tell me which quotes sound like they came from rock-ribbed American conservatives and which sound like they came straight off Noam Chomsky’s website.
After that, tell me what you think it means that it’s so hard to tell. Is it possible that the American right and the American left have found an issue about which they agree completely?
Do you think these views actually have anything to do with Britain or Europe? Or is the whole thing just a giant political Rorschach test?
Published in General
You are technically correct – the best kind of correct!
Claire,
Here is the argument made more clearly.
Nevermind the Brexit, UK will emerge with a good trade deal
I will stand by my assessment of EU’s ability to make trade deals. Britain can counteract size with nimbleness. The EU is clumsy and will be experiencing increasing dissension from its members. There is a limit to economies of size. Sometimes smaller is better. EU can rely on their anti-democratic autocracy but that too will only exacerbate internal tensions.
Regards,
Jim
Internationalist pap died upon impact with nationalist realpolitik.
Here are my predictions:
Bureaucrats and ideologues don’t give up so easily.
Finally, a bold man. I’ll say no to both of’em. Let’s wait to collect more of these bold statements & we’ll have a special post about’em & we can come back & check!
Yep.
I think it depends on who replaces Cameron.
I also think Cameron is getting a pretty brutal reception at supper right now and that he leaves office before October.
I thought the October date was odd too given the circumstances. I’m with you on that one.
I had the impression that was just an outer bound date, given to give the Conservative party time to figure out its succession and what it wants out of negotiations with the EU, and given with the expectation of sooner action.
Eric Hines
I think the elections are becoming more about inside vs. outside. Those on the Right and Left that are for the EU are insiders, throne sniffers and cronies who game the system for their own profit. Those who vote against are outsiders who have realized they get screwed by whoever is in power.
Imagine that the US broke up, so that you could only legally live and work in the state where you were born. That would certainly have its downside, so much so that I doubt that many Americans would wish it – despite all the inconveniences imposed on them by the federal government.
Such is the situation however that Europeans will face if the EU breaks up. The EU leadership must be really bad to cause so many Europeans to be willing to give up their freedom to live and work Europewide in order to be free of it. Either that, or European tribalist demagogues must be so effective in harping on the down side of European unity that people don’t take into account what they are about to lose. Or both.
As to the right and left convergence against liberal internationalism, see Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” it’s all there. Sooner or later collectivism requires the invocation of the tribal instinct. Thus national socialism. Thus Trump.
Robert,
As the EU parliament is a rubber stamp doesn’t that already constitute a kind of International Socialism? Thus Hillary. The EU started as just a trade alliance. It morphed into an unelected Eurocrat superstate who’s ruling elite bears an eerie resemblance to Stalin’s Soviet Russia. If Brussels doesn’t give you that old Orwellian feeling I don’t know what would.
I think it is a great relief that this is finally out in the open. An ordinary respect for the Right of an individual nation is not fascism. However, a blind acceptance of an unelected bureaucratic overclass is a soft cultural marxism. Of course, the fatal conceit of Marxism, cultural or full blown, is that it will work at all. In fact, it is a giant parasite that is living off the creative energy of democratic capitalism. If it should succeed in killing its host and taking over, like in Venezuela, then the horror really begins. Once you’ve run out of other people’s money, morality, and ordinary common sense then total misery is the result.
Regards,
Jim
The comparison of the EU and the US is apt in understanding the issue of central usurpation of power at stake. However, the differences are very great and a straight analogy is terribly misleading. European culture is still far more diverse than in the US, and US centralization has been much more gradual with still many more levers to combat it.
With regard to national socialism and Trump, that’s from Mars. Godwin’s law, anyone?
Note:
This comment was flagged but ruled to be within the CoC. Reasons: 1) In general, one is not faulted for -- upon request -- more fully explaining a thought; 2) Zubrin has explicitly made clear that he is using the phrase "national socialism" the the same fashion that FA Hayek did in his writing. Though the Third Reich was clearly at the top of Hayek's mind when he wrote The Road to Serfdom, its thesis was that the phenomenon that brought the Nazi Party to power could, indeed, happen anywhere and not through wholly malevolent causes; and 3) Zubrin has repeatedly drawn a distinction between the Nazis and national socialism in general.Nope. Trump is a person who is using xenophobic demagogery to mobilize mob support for an agenda of unlimited government, socialistic policy, and one man rule. Cry “Godwin Godwin Godwin” all you like. That is the textbook definition of a national socialist.
Robert,
I missed the part where Trump declared Americans the Master Race. I missed the part where he insisted upon Ethnic Racial Cleansing. I missed the part where he said America needed more Living Space.
Well, you know me I rarely pay attention.
Regards,
Jim
http://ricochet.com/donald-trump-national-socialist/
Robert,
Remember when Martin O’Malley confronted the Black Lives Matter folks he said, “All Lives Matter”. They nailed him. What a racist. Why if you let that Martin O’Malley loose in your incubator of fascism, Martin Bormann would probably jump right out in only a few months.
Thanks for the warning.
Regards,
Jim
An excellent statement of the Wilsonian view of foreign policy. Not at all Conservative, of course. Contrast to Washington, for a real Conservative view.
And the answers are:
Congratulations, Austin Murray, your leftist detector is almost foolproof. The rest of you also found that the left and the right sound a lot like each other on this one. I maintain my original position: Anything that makes the left happy probably isn’t an unalloyed good thing.
I think you should set this up as a post.
Sounds good. Don’t forget that for all the millenial desire for instant gratification the UK will still be a member of the EU for at least another two years.
I endorsed the right post! That must count for something….no?
Just in case anyone was wondering, here are the scores:
Austin Murrey: 10/11
Ario IronStar: 8/11
Percival: 6.5/11
Zafar: 6/11
Everyone scored above 50%, with an average of ~7.5/11. Given, the analytical pose of most of the excerpts and lack of context, I judge this to fairly well refute Claire’s point. Of course, the comments do a much more convincing and precise job of refuting Claire.
I’m disappointed to see that Claire didn’t list the scores seeing as she had to tally them to comment. To not list those scores and then say that “The rest of you also found that the left and the right sound a lot like each other on this one” indicates that Claire doesn’t think her case is strong.
Of course, a more thorough test would have included comments of left and right who OPPOSED Brexit (myriad examples) and see if you can tell the difference. Similar results would utterly destroy Claire’s point.
91% of the time it works everytime.
A vast amount of the left really, really wanted REMAIN as well. So did a lot of the right (PM, etc.). So you can say the same thing about the position you prefer.
When you conclude the way you did, I have to ask, what was your point again?
We had an election where one party ran on the Vincent Laguardia Gambini platform (“Everything that guy just said is [tauroscat].”)
That was the Democrats in 2004. They lost badly.
I, and I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this, do not decide things based on, “Whatever the left says, I’m against it.” National sovereignty is a good thing. Period. If the left happens to agree with that then good for them.
I demand a recount!
(no, wait … that’s not going to help …)
I demand a do-over!
(just like the remainers.)