Brexit

Well, they did it.  The Queen’s subjects in the United Kingdom have voted, 52% to 48%, to withdraw from the European Union.

This wasn’t a neat “conservative”/”liberal” issue.  It doesn’t reflect a conveniently partisan divide.  And many observers are frankly puzzled as to what impact it will ultimately have.  (Right now, the stock and currency markets seem to be in a panic.  The pound has fallen to its lowest level in more than three decades, which is great for us at the moment.)

It’s something of an earthquake.

In the wake of the vote, Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that he will resign in October.  And Jeremy Corbyn, the very-left leader of the Labour Party, is also under some pressure to step down.  Both had strongly supported remaining within the EU.  Boris Johnson, perhaps the most prominent leader of the Leave movement (and a Conservative who was, until very recently, the mayor of London), is a distinctly possible replacement for Cameron at 10 Downing Street.  (Nigel Farage, after Johnson probably the other most prominent Leave advocate, heads the separate UK Independence Party, or UKIP.)

This is an interesting result because it seems to reflect, at least in part, the same kind of frustration and nationalism that has fueled Trumpism and similar such movements in other countries (e.g., the Le Pens’ Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s movement in the Netherlands, Austria’s Freedom Party, Italy’s Northern League, and the Alternative für Deutschland, to say nothing of UKIP and, far over on the extremist edge, Britain First and the National Alliance).  There are now demands in the Netherlands and in France for referenda there, too, on leaving the European Union.

As one commentator has remarked, if Donald Trump were a political platform in a referendum rather than the grotesque individual human that he actually is in a contest between people, he would very likely win in November.  Just as he has consistently been underestimated, so, too, the strength of the Leave position was underestimated.  As recently as last night, polls indicated that Remain would win, and that the Remain position had actually picked up momentum during the past week or so (particularly following the brutal assassination of the pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox by a man linked with Britain First).

But Mr. Trump is Mr. Trump, and his disqualifying temperament, demagoguery, crassness, ignorance, instability, and lack of moral character will (as they should) very likely deny him the White House.  And, thus, instead of fascism lite, we in American will get socialism lite.

Posted from Brockwood Hall, Cumbria, England