David Frum, hater of Differents, wrote a piece defending the Leave campaign’s argument of anti-immigration. If we don’t heed the clarion populism we saw on display here, he said, Donald Trump will be elected in the US and elites will soon enough understand just how serious this business about the Differents really is.
I'm not sure about all of that, but there is, as Trump would say, "something going on." According to Frum, the UK's population has skyrocketed in the past decade solely due to the births and arrivals of immigrants. England is becoming less English. It reminds me of a lesson that I cite far more frequently than I would if it were joined by any other notable example, which is that a xenophobic Palestinian in 1935 would have been, basically, right. Sometimes, defending your identity isn’t a bad thing.
But isn't it bad when the people voting to preserve their identity do so out of ignorance? Isn't it bad to openly advance nativism and xenophobia?
I think a lot of liberals are saying yes to those questions today, but also emphasizing the importance of understanding the legitimate grievances of a small island nation dealing with an influx of foreigners. I even came across one source that makes Brexit, and more departures, predictable. In April’s Atlantic article “The Obama Doctrine,” Jeffrey Goldberg cites John Kerry as fretting about the problem of the potential for ISIS to cause mass disorder beyond their region. Kerry, it seems, knew something we didn’t.
“Imagine what would happen if we don’t stand and fight them…. You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out.”Um.*
So maybe this vote wasn't as stunning a development as it’s being made out to be.
Or, maybe what’s happened is that the deepening fissure of economic inequality finally ripped the papered-over veneer of good taste that elitist media has long enforced. I used to think that racism would, over the course of my lifetime, become increasingly permitted in public as racial progress stalled for more than a few generations. That may still happen.
Or, maybe what’s happened is that the deepening fissure of economic inequality finally ripped the papered-over veneer of good taste that elitist media has long enforced. I used to think that racism would, over the course of my lifetime, become increasingly permitted in public as racial progress stalled for more than a few generations. That may still happen.
But I wonder if the fatal blow to the anti-racist, cosmopolitan views of the world was that the kinds of people who held those opinions became increasingly distant from the people who didn’t care about broadcasting their social class in the form of trendy inclusiveness. It’s one thing to sign on to some rich person’s vision of a happy, cohesive world when you might join them on top one day. If things are going the other way, and you and the cosmopolitan grow to inhabit vastly different worlds, suddenly it's not as important to be open and cuddly to the immigrants you perceive as threats. (If there's any truth to this theory, it's probably moreso in the US, where class is less ossified.)
Whatever the motives, the Leave camp and UKIP sold an impossible promise. There is no such a thing as preserving one's culture. In my mind, the active verb of culture is miscegenation. The same way that water flows and animals breathe, a culture's nature is to mix and morph. For proof, look no further than the UK's own history, where Romans, Scandinavians, Germanic tribes, and all kinds of weird Druidy native people collided for centuries. Today's prototypical ball-of-pasty-flesh Brit is a mongrel by the standards of those ancient tribes, but tribalism always finds a way. Racial purity, ironically, demands a protean definition.
Nowadays we see the British hating on Eastern Europeans. Does that count as racist? It kind of is, right? The funny thing is that to my American eyes, which are so used to seeing bigotry along color lines, Brits heckling Polish immigrants with xenophobic taunts actually looks sort of quaint. White-on-white bigotry!
Nowadays we see the British hating on Eastern Europeans. Does that count as racist? It kind of is, right? The funny thing is that to my American eyes, which are so used to seeing bigotry along color lines, Brits heckling Polish immigrants with xenophobic taunts actually looks sort of quaint. White-on-white bigotry!
From what I've seen, the smarter liberals do understand that Britain needs work for white Britons. Economies are supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. Multi-culti as it might be to welcome migrants from all over the place, it's not sustainable in certain numbers. That's just reality. Whether Britain hit that critical mass is a different question entirely. The United States is a far way from any kind of suffusion of immigrant labor, but the point remains: governments disregard the fortunes of their native sons at their own peril.
Looking ahead, the question I'm most interested in is how the narrative will unfold as to how Brexit came to happen. Who gets the blame? I mean, when Wall Street creates financial crises, everyone excoriates them. Bernie Sanders built his entire campaign on eight-year-old resentment towards financial institutions. With Brexit, it was the people who fucked up. How will that play out in politics? Will there ever be such a thing as a sentiment of restricting the say of the citizens? What if the next prime minister proposes a referendum -- will the UK resist? I suppose a cynic would say that such a sentiment always exists, and that's why we vote for leaders. Lol Britain.
*By the way, elsewhere in that Atlantic article Goldberg tells the story of Obama’s attempt to build a coalition of countries to intervene in Syria after they used nerve gas. Among the hawkish proponents was David Cameron, who prepared to join the multinational effort against Assad with his own strikes. But first, just to be sure, Cameron called a vote in Parliament to authorize the operation. They voted no, dealing a huge blow to every other country that was about to proceed. It’s kind of funny: is this guy only good for calling votes that go against his agenda? There was that, there was the Scottish secession vote, and there was the Brexit vote. Christ, how much democracy can one guy take?
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