Brexit is now reality and a lot of folks are panicking. Don't. If you are a Trump right-winger celebrating, don't. This has little to do with the U.S. and it isn’t a prelude to a Trump comeback and November victory. Jeff Sessions is still a bigot and idiot when he writes on Breitbart, ”Now is our time” and urges Americans to “choose independence”. Laura Ingraham is delusional as ever when she crows, ”Do you hear us now?” as though Brexit and Trump’s Mexican wall are the same thing. They aren’t. And it isn’t just the extreme right-wingers: real journalists, such as some in the BBC have equated Brexit and Trump as well.
They all sing from the same hymn: ”the experts missed Trump's rise, missed Brexit and that means Trump wins in November, because — you know — angry men and the experts don’t know”.
It means nothing of the sort.
Now if you own a house in London with a big mortage, or work at a bank in the City, this could suck. If you are an EU bureaucrat still dreaming of the “United States of Europe”, this sucks. The UK will face a lot short term pain and Brexit creates further economic and political confusion in the EU. It’s a real political crisis, a historical turning point but it also took decades of political and economic malpractice to get here. Despite the outward appearance of racism and xenophobia running amok, there is actually little in Brexit that is black and white, apart from the respective hair colors of David Cameron and Boris Johnson — the Tory in and out adversaries.
While Brexit will not prove an easy path for the UK to negotiate, its not like the European Union was a Garden of Eden. Has everyone forgotten what the EU did to the people of Greece last summer during the Grexit crisis? The EU is a broken institution and membership comes with ample helpings of pain.
This is a lot more complicated than Brexit = Donald Trump.
As Americans we should leave Brexit to the Europeans to sort out. They created the problem. They should fix it. There may be some knock on economic effects around the world but it’s no Lehman moment.
We should focus on our potential economic and political disaster that threatens not just America but the whole world — a Trump Presidency.
I created this visual with some some very British advice about fighting fascism.
We defeat Trump by keeping our heads and doing our job — working to unify the Democratic Party, supporting both the Clinton campaign and progressive Senate and Congressional races and nurturing the multi-racial coalition that got us this far. Keep calm and carry on and work like hell through November 8th.
A good start to keeping calm is Paul Krugman’s take on Brexit.
I’m finding myself less horrified by Brexit than one might have expected – in fact, less than I myself expected. The economic consequences will be bad, but not, I’d argue, as bad as many are claiming. The political consequences might be much more dire; but many of the bad things I fear would probably have happened even if Remain had won.
Start with the economics . . . right now all the talk is about financial repercussions – plunging markets, recession in Britain and maybe around the world, and so on. I still don’t see it.
Ignore too, the hype about the xenophobia and racism of the Brexit LEAVE crowd. It’s true that Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and other LEAVE leaders are racist, xenophobic manipulators. But despite that, Brexit was never a clear cut case of enlightened pro-Europeans versus stupid nationalistic racists. The introduction of the Eurozone transformed the EU into a neo-liberal institution dedicated to austerity. It continues along that path despite European economic stagnation — and despite reality that shows it doesn’t work. Even the IMF now gets that neo-liberal economics is a failure.
Youth unemployment in Greece is 49%. It's 45% in Spain. Croatia is at 40% and Italy, 39%. Even in Sweden, the country where I live, youth unemployment is 19%. This is what passes for acceptable in the European Union. No wonder a lot of Brits wanted out.
Anyone who thinks the EU is an enlightened institution wasn't paying attention during last summer’s Grexit crisis. (I wrote about it here and here). Furthermore the EU was never about bringing peace to Europe — another thing you’ll read over and over that isn’t true. Remember what a mess the EU — in its predecessor form as the EC — made of Yugoslavia when war came there in the 90s?
The EU started as a trading block for coal and steel and ended up as a place for corporations to set the trading rules they want while end-running national governments. It was never a peace keeping organization — that was NATO. And thank god NATO is still around doing its job. It makes the coming European realignment a much safer affair. Dumping NATO, by the way, is another of Trump’s silly and dangerous ideas.
Brexit is complicated. It isn’t just xenophobic racists angry about immigrants, although that’s in the mix. But its also not so simple as struggling working people trying to free themselves from the tyrannical austerity of the neoliberals at the EU. Because the British Tories are even worse and the Torry lot that were pushing Brexit — who now will run the UK — are among the baddest of the bad.
Bottom line, the British working class voter was stuck between a neoliberal EU and a neoliberal Tory government in London. The economic press kept saying everything rosy, but it sure didn't feel that way to a lot of people outside London, including substantial numbers of Labour voters who voted LEAVE. It wasn’t just a vote against Brussels, it was also a vote against Cameron.
The Brexit crisis is not comparable to US politics apart from the angry anti-immigrant language common to both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage of UKIP. The economic and political policies of President Obama and those proposed by Hillary Clinton have nothing in common with those of David Cameron and the EU.
What happens next in the UK and EU is up to the British and the Europeans. If they continue to accept the same Tory neoliberal fantasies that motivate Koch Brother Republican conservatives, then it might not be long before England resembles Kansas.
There is a progressive version of Brexit and we should hope the British left embraces it quickly, rather than moaning about the real and significant problems that are also part of Brexit. This take by Paul Mason in the Guardian is worth a look.
Because of austerity economics the economic fear that drove Brexit was real. It's not comparable to what is driving the Trump vote. Our political press writes again and again about the worried working class Trump voter, but they back it up with anecdotes, not facts. Nate Silver’s Five-Thirty-Eight politics on the other hand used statistics to bust that myth when they showed that the average median income of a Trump voter is $72,000, well above the national average. Trump voters may be angry white men, but they are hardly the down-and-out. The ignored white working class meme — with angry white men at its center — is nothing new in American politics, as Heather Digby Parton pointed out in Salon:
Now we are witnessing yet another iteration of the phenomenon with the Trump voter of 2016, a very, very angry white guy everyone supposedly ignored for years. But the truth is that whether they are Reagan Democrats or Reagan Republicans or Heartland voters or Southern white males, these citizens’ needs and desires are always at the forefront of media attention in virtually every election. And their concerns are always the same: They believe they are personally getting screwed because immigrants and welfare queens and gays and feminists and foreigners are all taking what they aren’t entitled to and America is weaker and less significant because of it.
The real fear of the Trump voter is the other — and this is where Donald Trump does have something in common with Nigel Farage and his corner of the Brexit crowd. Polling shows the same thing again and again: that the majority of Trump voters are with him because they share his racism and xenophobia. Republicans have toyed with racism for years. But Trump uses it like a bulldozer. This is some of the most recent polling research on the subject:
. . . the more anti-outsider ideology isn't just about immigrants. It also pertains to discrimination against racial groups and globalization.
For example, while 72 percent of Republicans believe that discrimination against whites has become as bad as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups, among Trump supporters the number is 81 percent.
And 74 percent of Republicans say the American way of life should be protected against foreign influence, while 83 percent of Trump supporters say this — including 45 percent who are "completely" in agreement.
Let’s work together and kick Trump’s sorry fradulent ass all the way from from Trump Tower New York to Mar-a-Lago Florida.
It’s not enough to defeat Trump in November, we need to crush him. If Trump narrowly loses this election, the millions of armed crazy racists he has unleashed will be very hard to control. The best outcome is a massive Democratic victory that demoralizes Trump supporters and splinters his movement. Something big enough to force the “respectable Republicans” now on the Trump train to ponder their folly for a long time to come. Something that forces a re-think of the Republican Party.
That means organizational muscle, grassroots activity, it means getting involved in whatever way you can. It means getting behind Hillary Clinton, especially if you live in a swing state. This election is not about two different visions of corporatist America, its about democracy versus fascism. The choice is just that clear. Or as Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution put it:
This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.
Keep calm and carry on — working like hell through November 8th.