Rubbernecking Brexit

Like a great many others, it seems, I have become a Brexit rubberneck. It was instantly fascinating when the Brits inflicted this thing on themselves two years ago; it has become all the more so as the deadline approaches and all of the UK’s options for how to move forward are bad or terrible. I have probably read more about Brexit in recent weeks than I have about my own country’s contortions. Everything about the subject—the history out of which the EU grew, the great benefits it has accrued to Europe and individual member countries, the problems and restrictions and cultural displacement that has accompanied those benefits, the politics behind the original referendum, the dynamics of the Leave vote, and the contortions the U.K. is going through in the aftermath—everything, all of it, seems to refract in one national calamity the most urgent questions confronting liberal democracy in the 21st century. The Wall Street Journal came the closest (of anything I have read) to capturing this big picture, stating that Brexit encapsulates the tension between the undoubted economic benefits of “neoliberal” globalism and the irreducible need (for such it now appears to be) for democratic nations to assert a national and cultural identity and sovereignty.

For a political junkie, there’s just a lot to think and talk about. The fascination is akin, of course, to rubbernecking a roadside accident, with that regrettable human affinity for watching someone else’s disaster (or what seems like someone else’s disaster, because Brexit is really every Western country’s problem, in more ways than one). I should say up front: although I think a great many Britons (including at least some Leave supporters with buyers remorse) must be wishing to God that David Cameron had never held that referendum, and although I continue to believe, in a general way, in what the EU represents, and that when all is tallied up, "Remaining" was the better choice--despite all of that, one of the things one learns after diving deeply into the subject is that there was a powerful and legitimate impulse behind the Leave vote that should not be dismissed only as reactionary nationalist obstinancy; that there are substantive grievances about political disenfranchisement and unaccountable decision-makers in Brussels, and about cultural dissolution through borderless migration that have been seized upon (and taken advantage of) by those more retrograde instincts. For believers in liberal democracy, this makes countering the reactionary nationalist tide more difficult, and a matter of close-range strategy as well as long-range planning and philosophy.   

For instance....if Brexit has demonstrated one thing for American politics, it is that liberal Democrats who want to contain and ultimately defeat the reactionary nationalist-populist movement need to get serious about immigration, even if we may think that the problem here is entirely different—and far, far, far less existentially threatening than it is in Europe—and that American fears about the southern border are stoked by an enormous amount of horseshit on the political right. The problem on the southern border is just that—a problem; Democrats should make it a priority to solve it and banish all talk of “open borders”.

It's worth noting, there’s quite a few highly interesting articles arguing for Leave from the liberal-left perspective. The most important point in the best of these, as I understand the argument, is that a nation is the vessel through which social democracy can thrive; and there is none other. “Democracy needs a demos, a people for whom government is of, by and for,” writes Alan Johnson in the New York Times . “Without one, all you have is inter-elite management, treaty law and money grubbing….It has been a colossal error…to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.”

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Between now and the deadline in March 2019 for the final exit, the U.K. is in a truly weird place. As of this writing (on Monday, December 17), Theresa May’s exit deal with the E.U. is expected to be rejected in the British House of Commons. Andrew Sullivan wrote a penetrating piece on the next-to-impossible task May has had. She has had to beg Europe’s leaders for concessions to make an exit as painless as possible; Europe has driven a hard bargain—and why shouldn’t it? If leaving the Union can be seen as painless, other nations will follow suit. So the deal May brought back satisfies no one at home—it returns sovereignty over the border to the U.K., but that’s about the only real chit for hardline Brexiteers. Her agreement would keep the U.K. within a single customs market, which allows for commonly agreed upon import charge duties—but that’s not the same as the single market that E.U. member countries enjoy, in which goods move unimpeded across borders. And despite this reduced status as a trade partner, the U.K. would still be subject to rules and regulations from Brussels (which Brexiteers regard as a fundamental betrayal of the Leave vote). Meanwhile, Remain-ers still see the whole thing as a defeat with almost certainly disastrous economic consequences for Britain (every economic analysis, so I have read, expects Brexit to be a net loss, possibly a very bad one, to the U.K.’s economy), and debilitating to young people who will likely face real obstacles to moving to and working in E.U. countries. The best thing that can be said of the agreement is that co-opts the reactionary nationalist movement on its most inflammatory point—immigration—while honoring the Leave vote but containing, to the extent possible, the damage from this very bad decision.

As Sullivan points out, May’s gamble is that the other alternatives to her exit bargain will be revealed, “in the cold light of day”, to be worse. Those other options include what’s called a “hard exit”—no deal at all with Europe, the U.K. simply out in the cold on March 18, 2019, facing enormous new tariffs on every imaginable product, hard barriers to travel across European borders, and the need for the U.K. to renegotiate its own bilateral trade deals with every single country in the world that the E.U. trades with now. This option has been described, entertainingly, by one British politician as turning England into a “1950s museum floating in the Atlantic.”   

The other alternative is a re-vote on the referendum, an option that is gaining some traction (Tony Blair is campaigning for it). There’s a lot of freight behind this idea but it carries enormous risks, and not just because the outcome of the vote would be uncertain. Adding to Theresa May’s problems, so I gather, is that she is generally regarded as, well, not very good at her job—which is sad because there is a great deal of courage and principle and patriotism in what she is doing. She voted Remain, but she is committed to honoring the vote of a democratic state, and to getting an exit that will keep the U.K. from being harmed as much as possible. And she has ruled out a second vote. Can a democratic nation really just call the equivalent of a mulligan—oops, sorry, we fucked up—and re-do a vote? It would be exceptionally divisive and would convince many Leave voters that they are as disregarded and disrespected as they have always felt themselves to be, pouring gasoline on the populist fire. As one Leave supporter put it, “The establishment can’t just keep re-doing the election until they get the result they want.” 

There is a retort to this and part of it has to do with the shameful conduct of some prominent Brexiteers who floated a lot of bullshit in the campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum—not just about, for example, the millions or billions of pounds that could be reinvested into the British National Health Service, but more generally that leaving the E.U. might be painless, that the U.K. could easily renegotiate its own trade deals as if it were still a global empire. In a routine campaign for political office, this kind of flim-flam might be regarded as standard operating procedure. In a vote as a fateful as Brexit, it amounts to something like political malpractice, for which the guilty parties should be ashamed, if anyone anywhere these days were ashamed of anything, ever.

On top of this, there were also reports of people who voted Leave but didn’t really understand what they were voting for, and some who voted Leave for the hell of it, thinking it had no real chance of passing. And then there are the suspicions that Russian misinformation may have played a part. All of this, in a an enormously fateful vote decided by four percentage points, does lend some weight to the idea that the first referendum was a botched and skewered exercise. 

But the stronger argument against Brexit has to do with the E.U. itself, and where it came from. The European Economic Community, which would later become the E.U., was first forged by the exhausted combatants of World War II out of a kind of cultural despair about whether European countries would ever stop slaughtering each other, which they had been doing since Medieval times, culminating in the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of the second war; it rested on the slim hope that they might, just possibly, do so if they were economically dependent on each other. 

Here is the thing: Of the great many idealistic visions that fell by the wayside in the bloody 20th century, this idea cannot be said to be one of them. Is it not, in fact, an unqualified success? Can it not be said that this idea is, in fact, one of the very, very few instances of the human race collectively acting with something approaching common sense?

Perhaps the thing the EEC eventually evolved into is a perversion of the original vision. But was it really impossible to reform and liberalize the E.U. from within, or to register some kind of British protest that was less self-defeating? Was it not possible to formulate a referendum that might have offered more choices or less stark choices, or rules that raised the bar for success so that so radical and far-reaching a decision could not be rendered by the slim majority that carried the day in June 2016? 

My strongest feeling about this matter, when all is said and done, is that the bitter, reactionary nationalist germ at the heart of Brexit—the same germ that has infected politics in my country—needs to be co-opted, smothered, contained and ultimately defeated, whatever it takes. Leftist supporters of Brexit, on either side of the Atlantic, are being enormously naïve if they underestimate the danger of this infection, this faction with which tyhey are making league. We have seen before where it leads, and however it dresses itself up, and whatever advantage it takes of legitimate grievances, it is, I believe, an enemy of civilization. Believers in liberal democracy need to be wise and crafty and resourceful in figuring out how to contain it. If a re-do of the referendum is impossible—and it may be that that a new vote would only inflame the infection---then it may be that Theresa May’s not-so-very-good deal with Europe may be the next best thing.