The Brexit thread

[American Dream]

Xenophobia, White Nationalism and Islamophobia do not go with an anti-State position in my view. It's too bad that people supported UKIP, much less Britain First.

[slimmouse]

Xenophobia, White Nationalism and Islamophobia do not go with an anti-State position in my view. It's too bad that people supported UKIP, much less Britain First.

Well of course they dont.

But what about the cocophany of minds who understand what youre saying ? . Not only that, they want us to stop bombing one another and telling each other what to do ?

[American Dream]

Stopping imperial wars and domination by systems of power and exploitation is not what Brexit will bring. Racism and Nationalism fueled it as much as a misguided desire to better the lot of the working class- and now it is ordinary people who will reap the whirlwind...

[slimmouse]

Stopping imperial wars and domination by systems of power and exploitation is not what Brexit will bring. Racism and Nationalism fueled it as much as a misguided desire to better the lot of the working class- and now it is ordinary people who will reap the whirlwind...

Oh, and which whirlwind might that be?

How was your day today AD? Done anything to make you feel proud?

When was the last projection of hope you offered anyone ?

FFS man.

[American Dream]

I don't think any of the people I see who have supported anti-immigrant/nationalist/islamophobic type shite are standing up for Brexit now.

Do you see it bringing in a better future?

[Harvey]

Do you see it bringing in a better future?

Is there ever a straight line to progress, when it happens?

[Harvey]

Something told me once, learning when and when not to lift up your anchor is an art. It can't be taught and yet somehow you learn. Anyway, the piano had been smoking, not me.

[American Dream]

I have no great love for the EU- nor a love for the Nation State- but I do fear that people's chauvinisms have led them astray. I see turbulent waters ahead, and I fear for the poor and working people- especially refugees, migrants and/or people of color- who I fear will suffer greatly in the years ahead.

Many people who voted for Brexit seem to have roughly similar views and motivations as those who support Trump.

[Harvey]

Many people who voted for Brexit seem to have roughly similar views and motivations as those who support Trump.

Unarguably true. And yet many also don't. Benefit of the doubt? Wouldn't that be the neighbourly thing to afford?

No, me either. But we can aspire.

[SonicG]

Xenophobia, White Nationalism and Islamophobia do not go with an anti-State position in my view. It's too bad that people supported UKIP, much less Britain First.

Well of course they dont.

But what about the cocophany of minds who understand what youre saying ? . Not only that, they want us to stop bombing one another and telling each other what to do ?

I still don't see a clear or hard link between Brexit being some kind of true expression of desires for an end to the war on terror or a much further rolling back of the war on drugs. Is that what you are trying to say here? That it is a true symbol of some libertarian urge no matter how convoluted? The has always had very repressive censorship laws, and I suppose they still lag far behind Europe on some level...Anyhow, as I said before, I do not see this as a cry of despair from the masses regarding the crushing despair of post-modern capitalism....

[Harvey]

Anyhow, as I said before, I do not see this as a cry of despair from the masses regarding the crushing despair of post-modern capitalism....

Who does? But it can easily become that. As it is, the establishment aren't too bothered about it being 'poor racist scum wreck Europe.'

[SonicG]

Anyhow, as I said before, I do not see this as a cry of despair from the masses regarding the crushing despair of post-modern capitalism....

Who does? But it can easily become that. As it is, the establishment aren't too bothered about it being 'poor racist scum wreck Europe.'

There have been various opinion pieces posted about how this is the first step of some grand liberation, a real kick in the nuts to the PTB...I thought that is what you are arguing..."Easily" though? Once again, first let's see if Brexit actually occurs and then, if it doesn't, the mass uprising of the disenfranchised...I am fairly certain Brexit will disappear in the smoke from the Bank of England and then, Monday morning, back to work...

ETA

[Belligerent Savant]

.

This may have been posted earlier. If so, disregard.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... rrors.html

Excerpt:

Fast forward to the Brexit campaign. In polite society in today’s Britain, any attempt to point out the massive problems with allowing unrestricted immigration onto an already overcrowded island, which can’t provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services for the people it’s got already, is dismissed out of hand as racism. Thus it’s not surprising that quite a few Britons, many of them nominally Labour voters, mumbled the approved sound bites in public and voted for Brexit in private—and again, the pollsters and the pundits were blindsided. That’s one of the downsides of the schism between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat; once the dominant minority loses the loyalty of the masses by failing to deal with the needs of those outside the circles of affluence and privilege, sullen outward conformity and secret revolt replace the mutual trust that’s needed to make a society function.

The EU, in turn, made a perfect target for disaffected voters among the working class and the poor because it’s entirely a creature of the same consensus of the affluent as the Labour party after Tony Blair and the Democratic Party after Bill Clinton. Its economic policies are guided from top to bottom by the neoliberal economics that came into power with Thatcher and Reagan; its unwavering support of unrestricted immigration and capital movement is calculated to force down wages and move jobs away from countries such as Britain; its subsidies inevitably end up in the pockets of big corporations and the well-to-do, while its regulatory burdens land heaviest on small businesses and local economies.

This isn’t particularly hard find out—in fact, it takes an effort to avoid noticing it. Listen to people bemoaning the consequences of Brexit in the latest reports from the British media, and you’ll hear a long list of privileges mostly relevant to the affluent that the speakers worry will be taken from them. Aside from a few fringe figures, those who voted for it generally aren’t talking, since they’ve learned from bitter experience that they’ll simply be shouted down with the usual shopworn accusations of racism et al.. If they were willing to talk, though, I suspect you’d hear a long list of burdens that have mostly landed on the ordinary working people so many of the affluent so obviously despise.

It’s probably necessary to note here that of course there are racists and xenophobes who voted for Brexit. Equally, there are people who have copulated with dead pigs who voted for Remain—I’m sure my British readers can name at least one—but that doesn’t mean that everyone who voted for Remain has copulated with a dead pig. Nor, crucially, does it prove that necrosuophiliac cravings are the only possible reason to vote for Remain. One common way to define hate speech is “the use of a demeaning and derogatory stereotype to describe every member of a group.” By that definition, the people who insist that everyone who voted for Brexit is a bigoted moron are engaged in hate speech—and it’s a source of bleak amusement to watch people who are normally quick to denounce hate speech indulging in it to their heart’s desire in this one case.

Let’s look deeper, though. There are, in fact, a significant number of poor and working-class Britons who hold deeply prejudiced attitudes toward foreign immigrants. Why? A large part of the reason is the fact that the affluent, for decades now, have equated racial tolerance with exactly those policies of unrestricted immigration that have plunged millions of the British working class into destitution and misery. In the same way, a great many poor and working class Britons couldn’t care less about the environment, and a large part of the reason is that the terms of debate about environmental issues have been defined so that the lifestyles of the affluent are never open to discussion, and the costs of environmental protection cascade down the social ladder while the benefits flow up. As Toynbee noted, when society splits into a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, the masses reject not only the leadership but also the ideals and values of their self-proclaimed betters. It happens tolerably often that some of those ideals and values really are important, but when they’ve been used over and over again to justify the policies of the privileged, the masses can’t afford to care.

Those Britons who are insisting that the majority doesn’t matter, and their country must stay in the EU no matter what the voters think, have clearly not thought through the implications of last Thursday’s election. Party loyalties have become very fluid just now, and the same 52% of British voters that passed the Brexit referendum could quite readily, with equal disdain for the tender sensibilities of the privileged minority, put a UKIP majority into the House of Commons and send Nigel Farage straight to 10 Downing Stree. If the British establishment succeeds in convincing the working classes and the poor that voting for UKIP is the only way they can make their voices heard, that’s what will happen. It’s a very unwise move, after all, to antagonize people who have nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, a very similar revolt is under way in the United States, with Donald Trump as the beneficiary. As I noted in an earlier post here, Trump’s meteoric rise from long-shot fringe candidate to Republican nominee was fueled entirely by his willingness to put himself in opposition to the consensus of the affluent described earlier. Where all the acceptable candidates were on board with the neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics of the last thirty years—lavish handouts for the rich, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect of our infrastructure at home and a monomaniacal pursuit of military confrontation overseas—he broke with that, and the more stridently the pundits and politicians denounced him, the more states he won and the faster his poll numbers rose.

At this point he’s doing the sensible thing, biding his time, preparing for the general election, and floating the occasional trial balloon to see how various arguments against Hillary Clinton will be received. I expect the kind of all-out war that flattened his Republican rivals to begin around the first of September. Nor is Hillary Clinton particularly well positioned to face such an onslaught. It’s not merely that she’s dogged by embarrassingly detailed allegations of corruption on a scale that would be considered unusually florid in a Third World kleptocracy, nor is it simply that her career as Secretary of State was notable mostly for a cascade of foreign policy disasters from which she seems to have learned nothing. It’s not even that on most economic, political, and military issues, Hillary Clinton is well to the right of Donald Trump, advocating positions indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the guy the Democrats claimed to hate not too many years back.

No, what makes a Trump victory in November considerably more likely than not is that Clinton has cast herself as the candidate of the status quo. All the positions she’s taken amount to the continued pursuit of policies that, in the United States as in Britain, have benefited the affluent at the expense of everyone else. That was a safe choice back when her husband was President, and both parties were competing mostly over which one could do a better job of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted. It’s not a safe choice now, when Trump has thrown away the covert rulebook of modern American politics, and is offering, to people who’ve gotten the short end of the stick for more than thirty years, a set of policy changes that could actually improve their lives.

Now of course that’s not what the politicians, the pundits, and the officially respectable thinkers of today’s consensus of the affluent are willing to talk about. The same dreary rhetoric applied to the pro-Brexit majority in Britain is thus being applied to Trump voters here in the United States. “Racist,” “fascist,” “moron”—all the shopworn, sneering tropes that the privileged use to dismiss the concerns of the rest of the population of today’s America are present and accounted for.

The passion with which these words are being flung about just now should not be underestimated. I had an old friend hang up on me in midsentence because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton; we haven’t spoken since, and I have no idea if we ever will. Other people I know have had comparable experiences when they tried to discuss the upcoming election in terms more nuanced than today’s conventional wisdom is willing to permit. One of the most powerful and most unmentionable forces in American public life—class prejudice—pervades the shouting matches that result. To side with Clinton is to identify yourself with the privileged, the “good people,” the affluent circles gazing admiringly at themselves in the Hall of Mirrors. To speak of Trump in any terms other than cheap schoolboy insults, or even to hint that Trump’s supporters might be motivated by concerns other than racism and sheer stupidity, is to be flung unceremoniously outside the gates where the canaille are beginning to gather.

It has apparently not occurred to those who parade up and down the Hall of Mirrors that there are many more people outside those gates than there are within. It has seemingly not entered their darkest dreams that shouting down an inconvenient point of view, and flinging insults at anyone who pauses to consider it, is not an effective way of convincing anyone not already on their side. Maybe the outcome of the Brexit vote will be enough to jar America’s chattering classes out of their stupor, and force them to notice that the people who’ve been hurt by the policies they prefer have finally lost patience with the endless droning insistence that no other policies are thinkable. Maybe—but I doubt it.

Outside the Hall of Mirrors, the sky is black with birds coming home to roost. Some of them have already settled on the rooftops of London. More of them are hovering above an assortment of European capitals, and many more are wheeling above the marble domes and pediments of Washington DC. When they land, their impact will shake the world.

[Harvey]

Anyhow, as I said before, I do not see this as a cry of despair from the masses regarding the crushing despair of post-modern capitalism....

Who does? But it can easily become that. As it is, the establishment aren't too bothered about it being 'poor racist scum wreck Europe.'

There have been various opinion pieces posted about how this is the first step of some grand liberation, a real kick in the nuts to the PTB...I thought that is what you are arguing...

It could be, but no I wasn't arguing that. But if I was, so what? Look again at who you're listening to. I am.

"Easily" though? Once again, first let's see if Brexit actually occurs and then, if it doesn't, the mass uprising of the disenfranchised...


The first reason for 'it was the ignorant, uneducated, poor, racist scum wot did it' is to shame all those who actually did into doubting their motive. The second is to devalue the result. The third is to spread the feeling of 'it's no bad thing to devalue democratic decisions, especially when the stinking racist poor are the demographic.'

I am fairly certain Brexit will disappear in the smoke from the Bank of England and then, Monday morning, back to work...

But by all means, play the game. Isn't that what we all want?

[SonicG]

Right, I see your points although it seems more that the demographic supporting it were not so much the poor and disenfranchised but rather the older countryside and suburb dwellers, scared by terrorism, immigrants (stealing jobs and more terrorism) even though they live in areas basically unaffected by it...

Oh by back to work, I mean many things...One of which, is back to the drawing board for the praxis to move towards that light at the end of tunnel...or is it just another train headed our way?
“Flee, but while fleeing, pick up a weapon”.

And I do think there are arguments to be made for pooh-poohing the so called "democratic decision" of the referendum. Should a slender majority rule?