Vox:
Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, is one of those rare events that should chill you to your core, as it has already chilled me to mine.
Why? Because Brexit calls into question the best thing humanity has created in its political history: the post-World War II global order.
"What’s terrifying about Brexit [is] that a lot of the global economy takes certain rules of the game as given," Dan Drezner, an expert on the global economy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told me. "They’ve assumed for quite some time — really, the past 70 years — that the global economy is moving in one direction, and that one direction is towards greater openness...Those rules of thumb are now being thrown out the window."
This global order depends crucially on a set of supranational institutions, like the EU. These institutions can only function if member-states can keep nationalism in check, and submit to a shared framework for governing the world. The global order has served us astonishingly well, making the post-Cold War era the richest and least violent time in human history.
But that optimism is now threatened. British voters, motivated largely by xenophobic nationalism, have opted out of one of the pillars of the post-war order, the European Union. For the first time since World War II, Western nationalism has beaten globalism in a major way.
The global order kept us out of war. Europe was very good at war. They can re-learn. So when you rail against the ‘establishment’, whichever one, keep in mind that on occasion stability can be a good thing. Oh, and be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
Guardian:
'If you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote out'
Brexit is about more than the EU: it’s about class, inequality, and voters feeling excluded from politics. So how do we even begin to put Britain the right way up? …
Most of all, Brexit is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s, whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has just about served the most populous parts of the country, while leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline. Look at the map of those results, and that huge island of “in” voting in London and the south-east; or those jaw-dropping vote-shares for remain in the centre of the capital: 69% in Tory Kensington and Chelsea; 75% in Camden; 78% in Hackney, contrasted with comparable shares for leave in such places as Great Yarmouth (71%), Castle Point in Essex (73%), and Redcar and Cleveland (66%). Here is a country so imbalanced it has effectively fallen over.
Guardian from March:
Nigel Farage [UKIP leader] has warned there is rising public concern about immigration partly because people believe there are some Muslims who want to form “a fifth column and kill us”, and that there has never before been a migrant group that wants to “change who we are and what we are”.
The Ukip leader also said that race and other anti-discrimination legislation should be abolished, arguing that it was no longer needed in the United Kingdom, in an interview with former equality and human rights commissioner Trevor Phillips for Channel 4.
Farage said the emergence of British-born Islamist extremists was an “especial problem”, with some Muslim immigrants who do not want to integrate prompting wider public concern.
Yoni Applebaum:
Perhaps Britain’s parliamentary democracy played a crucial role. Its voters are accustomed to electing representatives who make stark promises, and then watching as they work out the painful compromises necessary for governance. This fueled the anger of recent decades, as voters looked on powerlessly as campaign pledges dissolved or picked up ballots devoid of representatives who would accurately reflect their opinions. Cameron gave them the chance to voice directly their own, unmediated views—without the filter of representative democracy to reconcile them with other constraints.
At least a few of those voters are stunned by the result. “I voted Leave but didn't think my vote would count,” one told the BBC. “I never thought it would actually happen.”
Well, it happened….
Whether Trump produces a similar success in November may depend less on what he does between now and then than the way the political elites he is challenging—in his own party, and on the other side of the aisle—choose to respond. Will they display enough empathy to convince angry, hurting voters they understand their pain is real? Will they exercise enough imagination to offer a positive vision of the future, one that promises them that America’s greatness lies ahead, and not behind?
If not, then “I never thought it would actually happen” will become their political epitaph, as well.
All this is good background for the “Oh Noez it happened in England so Trump’s gonna win” discussions that are bound to flow. While there are parallels, there are also major distinctions.
Among them, a catastrophic market crash is not something you want to tie yourself to. Nor is Scotland a swing state. And if it were:
Huffington Post:
Donald Trump is not getting the warm Scottish welcome he was hoping for.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee arrived in Scotland on Friday to officially open his new Trump Turnberry golf resort. Protesters greeted him with golf balls emblazoned with Swastikas, a symbol of Nazi Germany, at the opening of the course.
Charles P. Pierce:
In addition, I'm less concerned than some of my fellow citizens that the vote in the U.K. is a premonition of a He, Trump groundswell over here. This is because He, Trump makes British space villain Nigel Farage sound like Talleyrand. Lay his genius on us, Washington Post:
"I think it's a great thing that happened," Trump told reporters shortly after his helicopter landed at Trump Turnberry. "People are angry, all over the world. People, they're angry." "When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly," Trump added during an afternoon press conference. "For traveling and for other things, I think it very well could turn out to be a positive."
He, Trump, of course, said this at Turnberry, which is in Scotland, which voted quite strongly to Remain. In fact, the Scots appear to be ready to Leave the U.K. rather than follow it out the door. (The same thing may be true in Northern Ireland.) Shut up now, please.
Dissent:
In shorthand, Britain’s EU problem is a London problem. London, a young, thriving, creative, cosmopolitan city, seems the model multicultural community, a great European capital. But it is also the home of all of Britain’s elites—the economic elites of “the City” (London’s Wall Street, international rather than European), a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations. It’s as if Hollywood, Wall Street, the Beltway, and the hipper neighborhoods of New York and San Francisco had all been mashed together. This has proved to be a toxic combination.
Yahoo:
The vote, which Trump repeatedly called “great” and “historic,” had immediate political and economic repercussions, sending the global financial markets into turmoil. Prime Minister David Cameron, who led the failed campaign to remain in the EU, announced his intention to resign. And the British pound plummeted in value, sending stock markets around the world into a free fall.
But Trump dismissed concerns about how the turmoil might affect the United States, saying “nobody knows” what the long-term result might be. The real estate mogul suggested that the fluctuating value of the British currency might actually drive growth — for him and others. “Look, if the pound goes down, they’re going to do more business. When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly,” Trump said, referring to his golf course. “For traveling and for other things, I think it very well could turn out to be a positive.”
Still, you have to think that the Brexit issues outlined here might well affect who Clinton picks for VP. Just as a terrorist/military crisis makes a Joe Biden attractive, a brexit economic crisis makes an Elizabeth Warren or a Sherrod Brown (ignoring for a moment who replaces them, with GOP Governors at home) hot properties.
Guardian:
“If we are victorious in one more battle … we shall be utterly ruined.”
Like the good intellectual that he’s vigorously pretended not to be of late, Boris Johnson will probably know that line. It’s from the Greek historian Plutarch’s account of the battle that gave us the phrase “pyrrhic victory”, the kind of victory won at such cost that you almost wish you’d lost.
In theory, Johnson woke up on Friday morning having won the war. After David Cameron’s announcement that he would step down come October, Johnson is now the heir presumptive – albeit at this stage very presumptive – to the Tory leadership, perhaps only four months away from running the country.
He has everything he ever wanted. It’s just that somehow, as he fought his way through booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it didn’t really look that way.
One group of Tory remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather pale Johnson said leaving Europe needn’t mean pulling up the drawbridge; that this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow “take the wind out of the sails” of anyone playing politics with immigration. Too late for all that now, one said.
The scariest possibility, however, is that he actually meant it. That like most of Westminster, Johnson always imagined we’d grudgingly vote to stay in the end. That he too missed the anger bubbling beneath the surface, and is now as shocked as anyone else by what has happened.
“People talk about reluctant remainers, but I think there have been a lot of reluctant Brexiters around, people who voted leave thinking it wouldn’t happen but they’d be able to vent and to tell all their friends at dinner parties they’d done it,” said one Tory minister.
Financial Times:
Friends and allies will have little sympathy. After surviving the twin crises centred on the euro and migration, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s François Hollande will not thank Britain for adding a third. Perfidious Albion has always been an awkward partner, but the Union will be weaker for the departure of such an important state.
Nor can Mr Cameron’s successor look to Washington for comfort. US President Barack Obama could not have been more candid that a leave vote would represent self-demotion in the contest for influence in the US capital. The “special relationship” is a description loaded more with symbolism than substance. Brexit will strip it of both. All this as the west is challenged by a revanchist Russia, by chaos and terrorism in the Middle East and uncontrolled migration.
Irritated as they are with Britain, these other leaders would do well to study carefully the forces at work in the referendum campaign. If a nation as innately cautious as Britain can tear up in the course of a single day foreign and economic policies that have been crafted over half a century, who can dare rule out an electoral earthquake propelling Mr Trump into the White House or Ms Le Pen into the Élysée? …
Capitalism needed saving, but in bailing out the financial institutions with taxpayers’ money, governments transferred the stresses from markets to politics. A return to economic growth would relieve some of the pressure. Europe in particular must understand just how politically corrosive slavish devotion to fiscal targets has become. But the politicians also must confront the excesses. If they want to save liberal democracy, they will have to reform capitalism.
WaPo, in which Hank Paulson joins a growing number of prominent Republicans for Clinton:
As a Republican looking ahead to November, there are many strong conservative leaders in statehouses across the United States and in Congress, whose candidacies I am actively supporting. They have a big job to do to reinvent and revitalize the Republican Party. They can do so by responding to the fears and frustrations of the American people and uniting them behind some common aspirations, while staying constant to the principles that have made our country great.
When it comes to the presidency, I will not vote for Donald Trump. I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world. To my Republican friends: I know I’m not alone.
John Nichols:
The Shaming of Paul Ryan Is Now Complete
From silencing debate on guns to backing “textbook-racist” Trump, the GOP “leader” always puts partisanship above principle.