Hey there and welcome. Perhaps it's just me, but I for one am quite relieved that as of midnight January 31st, 2020. Brexit has indeed finally come to pass.
Now I know as an American being so interested in a British issue might seem to some as an odd and distant concern. I mean, they (the Brits) play weird games like Cricket, occasionally drink warm beer, don't have the most interesting gastronomy of Europe, and in some regional cases "English almost disappears" to quote Professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady fame.
Still, I think many of us (non-Brits, that is) have peripherally followed the intransigence of the Left / Labour Party in the United Kingdom as well as the vexing fecklessness of the Tories throughout this long process of referendums, calls for renewed referendums, talk shows and YouTube videos, three trillion articles, and demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. We must admit that such divisiveness is nothing new and went hand-in-hand with the increasingly vitriolic left-right rhetoric and felt eerily familiar to anyone who has watched the Trump versus Left paradigm in the US, the Yellow Vests versus Macron in France, the Democracy calls of Hong Kong against the Chinese Communist government, and the post-Arab spring world, etc., etc.
So, what, you may ask, does all of this mean?
Well, rather dwelling on notions and emotions, I'd rather focus on the philosophic root causes of the Brexiteers versus Remainers schism and point out that it occurred for the same reasons that caused Donald Trump to be elected US President in 2015. As a microcosm of this issue we only need to look to what can only be seen as a predictable response to the above hypothesis that I imagine would slip from a typical leftist's mouth as they flippantly quip, "Yeah, both the average Brit and average American are just racist, xenophobic, misogynist, capitalist A-holes".
Those are of course not the reasons, but merely the reaction the left has been programmed by the media in order to respond to all those who do not share their opinion of the glorious road into the future. I mean, they're trying to save the world, literally, for future generations, don't you know? How virtuous they are!
So let's look at the big picture, shall we?
For the majority of its history the Labour Party in the UK was a Classical Liberal outfit that was generally moderate but incorporated Progressive ideology starting in the Victorian and Edwardian Periods. Their primary cause was the betterment of the lives of the poor, working-class people of Great Britain - mainly by offering them a representative voice in the areas of Trade Unions and National Health issues.
Just as in the Democratic party in the US, Labour gradually incorporated more and more Socialist ideology into their platform, until, within reason, their leaders often propounded notions that would be much more comfortable within a Communist context.
Thus, it should come as no surprise to anyone today that Labour Party Big Cheese Jeremy Corbyn and Presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders pretty much parrot one another in almost every respect.
As so called Socialists, or as they like to frame it (for those of us with weaker hearts) "Democratic Socialists", who are in actuality just Communists in sheep's clothing, they are by their nature, inclination, and dogma, "internationalists". In case you've forgotten your Karl Marx 101, I must remind you that Communism is meant to take over the entire world - with Socialism serving merely as the gateway drug to saddle the nascent embryo of those ideals onto otherwise Democratic systems. Socialists often deny this, but this was indeed Marx's premise of political evolution.
This internationalism is exactly why the left will go to no ends to distance themselves from their Socialist brethren who opted to attempt to institute these sort of dramatic economic changes on a per nation basis. They will swear up and down that any conflation of Nationalism with Socialism is by definition is "right wing", confusing the Civic Patriotism of Conservatives and Republicans with economically Socialist, yet Authoritarian regimes, such as the Pan-Arab Ba'ath Socialists of Saddam Hussein and the Assad boys, the payback-seeking Serbian Socialist junta of Milosevic in Bosnia, and of course the king of all secular Ethno-Nationalists - Hitler and the German Workers National Socialist Party, otherwise known as the Nazi Party.
In the US Globalism entered into the political sphere via the Populist Party in the 1880's and can be seen as coming into crystallization under President Woodrow Wilson's administration during the first World War and his goal of establishing the League of Nations - the precursor to the largely useless and mostly corrupt United Nations.
Regardless, "Globalism" - sometimes disguised by the term "Trans-Nationalism" (a term which I believe was coined by Nelson Rockefeller) festered through the mid-twentieth century and stood as a respectable counter to "Marxist Globalism" in that it still held that Capitalism was something that can be worked with rather than "eliminated".
The means of production were not to be taken over by the state (as in Communism), they merely would be regulated (kind of like Fascism). Within reason, the same re-distributive premise that is overt in Socialism was involved and in the establishment of the European Union, and the economies of all member states were designed from the start to be managed, controlled and manipulated by a faceless, un-elected, bureaucracy based in Brussels. Yay!
Many of the early philosophic founders of the European Union admired the organization of the Fascist dictatorships, and while Fascists and Communists have sworn an eternal pact they are the Lawful-Evil and Lawful-Good of the political spectrum, we must never forget that every Communist state that has ever existed has instead applied the term "Socialist" in their national moniker, and ended up being guilty of the same authoritarian Fascist behavior that they insisted they were so against. Regardless, a government with "Socialist" somewhere in it's name was literally and, ahem, collectively, responsible for well over 100 million deaths through genocide and culturcide in the 20th century.
So in a nutshell, Marxist Globalists want the world to eventually come under the control of a single Utopian Communist state, Trans-National Globalists want the world to eventually come under the control of an Elitist left-leaning bureaucracy. I would almost call this the conflict between Globalism and Globalization, if you get my drift. On the other hand Ethno-Nationalists (such as the Nazis or ISIS) want their specific country and / or ideology to dominate first their nation, then their region, and then the world.
On the other, other, hand Civic Nationalism insists that each country is entitled to exist, and to be free of inclusion from these supra-blocks if they so decide so. In the past this was simply called "Patriotism", and in the US, the founding fathers made it clear that this had nothing to do with race, but rather ideology. Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were not concerned with "foreigners" adding their numbers to America, they were only concerned that those new arrivals would not understand the core Classical Liberal values they had striven so hard to establish.
For one to be patriotic, one requires a nation - a sovereign nation - to exist, and ideally that nation will democratically represent the interests of the population. This is what Brexit was really about. A referendum was called and the majority wished to leave the European Union. The Remainers, much like the bitter Democrats, their puppet media, and their strangle- hold on the (re)education system, were not able to properly process that their dogma was not unilaterally dominant in all matters. Like "Trump Derangement Syndrome" the Remainers quickly cultivated "Brexit Derangement Syndrome".
This is mostly due to the fact that the increasingly radicalized left has historically always just sort of "tolerated" Conservatives and Republicans in both the UK and USA, as long as the latter kowtowed to them and approved whatever idiotic policies they wanted to have financed at the moment. You give me Trans- gender bathrooms and we'll let you have some more tanks and submarines. That sort of thing.
However, it seems abundantly clear now (especially since the Tea Party, etc.) that the left might not gotten the memo that world has indeed changed of late. Frankly, it's their own fault for turning their their agenda "up to eleven" and not expecting a backlash.
In the last twenty years Communism and Socialism has started to die globally. India, a previously Democratic Socialist land embraced Capitalism and low-and-behold, suddenly created a 500 million person middle class where none existed before. Likewise even Communist China, after incorporating Free Trade zones, sudden had a 650 million person middle class on its hands. Russia - the role model of the Communist nations, for all of it's Kleptocracy, embraced Capitalism, and now has more billionaires than anywhere else on earth. Vietnam, Cambodia, etc., etc., have all shifted away from full-tilt Marxism, and only outliers like the destitute North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela remain as stunning examples of how failed Karl Marx's utopian notions were.
Within reason it can be argued that Marxism, Socialism, and Communism lost well over a billion devotees around the globe between the years 2000-2020, which I guess makes it all the more ironic that in the same period Europe and the USA have seen swells of (mostly younger) people identifying as Marxists in their political arenas via Marxist Intersectionality (Race, Class and Gender Warfare), Post-Modern language policing (PC), and in general, "Woke" politics.
It seems that rather than the rats fleeing a sinking ship, leftists have opted to go on the full-tilt attack, transferring all of their negative attributes onto their opponents (as suggested by Saul Alinsky). The Democrats (who were / are the party obsessed with race, have routinely slandered the Republicans as the "racist party" for years, notwithstanding the fact that it was they who were the pro-slavery / pro-segregation party and the Republicans were the ones to put slavery to an end. But I digress. Well, maybe I don't, because this is exactly what the Woke Labourites have done to the Tories and to those who voted them in, and who voted for Brexit.
Rather than looking at this conflict as simply a difference of political opinion, the left looks at this as a moral conflict. They are good, the other side - bad. And as this is the framework in which they work. They were incapable of losing a vote to such "horrible" and "stupid" people. The "basket of deplorables", as Hillary Clinton deemed all Trump voters / most Republicans. Thus, while there should really never have been such a thing a Remainer, there should have also never been the phenomena of Tory Brexit apologists. The vote was what it was. I mean, the nation is a democracy, isn't it? Oh, I forgot, Socialists sometimes find it very easy to slide into authoritarianism, as witnessed from the aforementioned data.
In order to get their way the left of course went the alarmist route, and if you listen to a typical Remainer, you might have gotten the impression that they thought that in the aftermath of the UK leaving the EU a wall was to be built around the island, that they would no longer be able to visit the continent for vacations, and that England would more or less be at a state of war with the rest of Europe. This was / is simply concocted hysteria, and not appreciably different from the left's endlessly tiring invective against Trump. I mean, at any moment everything is about to go belly-up, right?
Anyway, I wish you, and all pro-sovereign anti-globalists out there a Happy Brexit Day!!! Maybe if we're lucky next time we'll have "Frexit", and leave the Germans to their "Fourth Reich".
I'd like to leave you with one last thought, which is a quote displayed in the European Union Parliament in Brussels. I think it says it all, and perhaps most ironically, it was penned by a a citizen of the UK - Philip Kerr; the 11th Marquess of Lothian, British Ambassador to the United States, and well-known appeaser of Hitler in the Pre-War years.
“National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our
times…The only final remedy for this evil is the federal union of the
peoples.”
With archetypes like him you don't need any enemies.
Till next time.
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