Thanks to long-time reader Todd for linking me to the “Best article I’ve read on the election so far.” It’s indeed an outstanding analysis, connecting the Trump election to England’s Brexit vote as a long-overdue reaction of ordinary people to the clueless, corrupt, and condescending rule of a political elite, as embodied in Hillary Clinton.
The article, excerpted and linked after the jump, is worth reading in its entirety just for that analysis. But what further interests me is that it is written by independent journalist and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald. He is a conduit for Julius Assange and Wikileaks, which proved so damaging to the Clinton campaign.
What is the connection, do you think, between the Wikileaks ideology of undermining the establishment by exposing its secrets and that of Donald Trump? Wikileaks publishes hacked documents in the name of civil liberty. Is the Trump movement an expression of civil liberties?
From Glenn Greenwald, Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit:
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
From Glenn Greenwald, Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit:
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