Started this more than a week ago, but things dragged out, making me late, or perhaps now I should say early?
After last week's referendum when 52% of the UK's voters decided to chuck it all and take Britain out of the European Union, David Eversall sent me this clipping from the Financial Times, adding "Probably has relevance for the Presidential election especially the last point."
A quick note on the first three tragedies. Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term from the dearth of jobs and investment. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another one. Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Micahel Gove said 'the British are sick of experts' he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has lead to anything other than bigotry?
Aside from the quibble that I suspect it's bigotry that leads to anti-intellectualism rather than the other way around, my reaction to the third point was "welcome to my world." Politics in America went counterfactual in the 1980s when Reagan came up with his "Morning in America" con (more on that at the end).
I'm afraid I didn't know much about Brexit before plodding through the links below. Let me try to summarize what I've learned:
Many in England never liked Europe, or thought of themselves as being part of Europe. They grew up on stories of how Britain won the great European wars of the last two centuries and built the largest empire the world has seen, and they never got over the loss of that empire or of their exceptional status in the world. They never lost their righteousness or their racism. They skew right -- always have -- and they formed the core of the Leave block, as they always would be.
The EU was originally a center-left concept, intent on erasing borders, on entangling the many separate nations of a rather small continent into a cohesive entity that would render impossible the myriad wars of recent centuries. This entity would be built on basic human rights and would advance political and economic equality. But this idea was repeatedly corrupted by business interests, knee-jerk appeals to nationalism, and the parallel cloak of war known as NATO -- which since 2001 has mostly served to exacerbate the divides between north and south, west and east, Crusader (for lack of a better term) and Muslim. One result was that the core for Remain was tepid and in many cases disillusioned.
In the 1980s Thatcher laid waste to industrial Britain while opening Europe to British capital, and later Blair delivered Labour to the financiers while committing the UK to Bush's disastrous "terror" wars. Britain hasn't had a credible leftist government since Wilson's in the 1970s (if not Attlee's in the 1940s), so Britain's experience of the EU has skewed horribly right.
The EU's bravest policy was the insistence on labor mobility. This didn't have a huge impact as long as the national economies were rich and relatively equal, but the EU was easily pressured to expand into less developed countries, and transfers to rebalance the economies have never been adequate. When this happened capital flowed out while cheaper labor flowed in -- the latter easily scapegoated by the right for depressed areas actually caused by capital flight. One result has been the growth of racist right-wing parties throughout Europe (like the anti-EU UKIP in Britain).
The rise of the right, both in Europe and in the US, has pushed immigrants and minorities into the hands of the left-center parties, often becoming significant stakeholders in those parties. This has tended to defocus the traditional class-schism between left and right -- perhaps more so in the US, where Democrats have few qualms about shafting labor in favor of liberal businesses, knowing that minorities have no choice but to vote for them. As this happens, older/whiter workers can lash back against the left-center. Conversely, liberals tend to focus on opposing racism and xenophobia rather than actually working for more equitable prosperity.
After the global finance bubble burst in 2008, the bankers and their politicians conspired to save themselves at the expense of everyone else. They controlled the EU, which ceased to be a reform movement and became an instrument for denying democracy and imposing austerity across the entire continent. This was perhaps worse in the Eurozone, but the UK, which had the flexibility of its own currency, followed suit with a crippling austerity program benefitting no one but the London banks. The right, which had caused most of this pain, found it easy to blame Europe, and many (even some on the left) readily bought that line.
Then there was sheer political opportunism. Tory leader Cameron promised to hold a referendum on leaving the EU during the last elections in a crass move to prevent conservative voters from defecting to UKIP. He assumed a referendum would be harmless, as all three major parties were committed to staying in the EU. Still, the Conservatives had long had a sizable anti-EU core, and Labour had recently revolted against the Blairites and elected leftist Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (who post-facto was charged as ineffective, possibly even uncommitted to the Remain cause). One result was that the campaign for Remain spanned the entire ideological spectrum without having any coherent vision or much commitment. (As I note below, "remain" itself is a remarkably passive and for that matter nonchalant verb.) Another was that it was practically defenseless against misleading and often ridiculous charges, the stock-in-trade of the right-wing tabloid press.
After the vote, the markets panicked, as markets tend to do. Still, nothing has happened yet, and separation will by all accounts take at least two years from whenever it starts, which isn't now because Cameron resigned and Parliament isn't actually required to pull the suicide trigger. Most likely there will be new elections and prolonged negotiations while nothing much actually happens -- other than continuation of the current rot -- and the folks who pull strings behind curtains get their ducks lined up.
One thing that's little commented on is the pernicious effect of NATO on Europe. Through NATO, the US sucked Europe into its Global War on Terror (most specifically its parochial war against Islam in Afghanistan), and also into its rekindled Cold War against Russia. The EU expanded aggressively into Eastern Europe, thereby unbalancing the equality of member states, mostly because NATO led the way. NATO aggression in North Africa and the Middle East then triggered a refuge crisis on top of Europe's previous immigration problem. One terrible result is that Europe has become targeted by ISIS-affiliated (a very loose definition) terrorists, which mostly serves to provoke hatred and backlash. The right builds on this, even though you'd think that anyone who frets over sovereignty worry more about the US/NATO.
I suspect that eventually we'll find that the EU has spun such a thick institutional web that it will prove impossible to disentangle it all. That is to say, the core nations are stuck with it, regardless of whether their people understand why. Still, movements to exit and hoist up renewed national borders will continue until the EU reforms into something that actually benefits most of the people pretty much everywhere, and their failure will continue to embarrass leaders of all parties but the most fringe. To do this, the EU needs to move left, if anything out ahead of the national parties. And it needs to do this not just to deliver on its original concept but to give people all across the continent reason to support it, and through it each other. These are things your center-right neo-liberals, dedicated as they are to making the rich richer and otherwise letting the chips land where they might, just can't do. Unfortunately, the center-left isn't able to either, especially when faced with the sort of "scorched earth" opposition the Republicans excel at in the US.
One last point: I cite several anti-EU leftists below, who are right to blame the US/NATO and who are not wrong to see the referendum as a broad rejection of neoliberal consensus. It's not clear that they also believe that the UK is more likely to move left without the EU than within, but I imagine they can make a fair case to that effect -- just now sure if that's because recession will make voters more desperate, because a nation not in the EU has more options, or both. Still, I can't share their enthusiasm for Brexit. I just can't see how a retreat into narrow-minded prejudice advances a more equitable society and a more humane economy.
In what follows, it may be tempting, sobering, even chilling to think of Leave as Trump and Remain as Clinton. I think that's probably why we often take away the notion that Leave was primarily racist/xenophobic and Remain as liberal/integrationist, even though there were many more nuances to each. But working that angle out should really be another exercise. I suspect we'll find many more angles there too (with Trump it's hard to think of anything as a nuance).
Some Brexit links:
Post-Brexit global equity loss of over $2 trillion -- worst ever.
Anne Applebaum: What the media gets wrong about Brexit: "The leave campaign does not have a common vision and does not have a common plan because its members wouldn't be able to agree on one."
Torsten Bell: The referendum, living standards and inequality: Several charts show that recent changes to income have little bearing on the vote. Rather, look at 1980s Thatcherism: "The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows."
Mike Carter: I walked from Liverpool to London. Brexit was no surprise: "Thatcherism devastated communities throughout industrial England that have never recovered. Their pain explains why people voted to leave in the EU referendum."
John Cassidy: Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote: Cites, and agrees with, Torsten Bell (above). Then notes how uninspiring the Remain campaign, backed lamely by leaders of all three major political parties, was: "The Remain side argued, in effect, that while the E.U. isn't great, Britain would be even worse off without it. That turned out to be a losing story." It occurs to me that "remain" is probably the most passive word in the English language. Why would anyone pick it as a slogan? In 2004, when the Iraq War had gone sour, Bush (or Rove or whoever) didn't campaign to Remain in Iraq. They opted for Stay, or more often Stay the Course, suggesting that there is a plan that will eventually pan out if only we don't lose our will. European Union, frankly, was a lot more promising idea than the Iraq War ever was, yet its so-called defenders seem to have lost faith in it or understanding of it and are left with nothing more to offer than the threat that if we fail to accept the status quo, things will only get worse.
Cassidy also wrote Why Brexit Might Not Happen at All and Sunderland and the Brexit Tragedy. I don't find the former very convincing, although I wouldn't be surprised if somehow the Leave win gets circumvented. There are a number of ways Britain's elites might go about ignoring the referendum results, with Cameron's resignation a first step, and Boris Johnson's reluctance to replace him a second. The former shipbuilding city Sunderland is another example: industry was shut down there during the Thatcher years, depressing the region to the point where the EU actually helps out, they still voted Leave. "Unless the Brexit vote is somehow reversed, the residents of places like Sunderland will most likely be left to fly the Union Jack and fester."
Amy Davidson: Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump: In particular, it reminds us that there are people who will vote for Trump not because of who Trump is but because of their own jaundiced worldview. I know a Trump supporter whose only explanation is "chaos" -- I suspect he'd vote for Charles Manson if given the chance. After all, what is Brexit other than a vote for chaos? Davidson quotes Hillary's response: "This time of uncertainty only underscores the need for calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House." And she thinks that's a winning argument against a clown who promises unpredictable entertainment?
Tom Ewing: Obsolete Units Surrounded by Hail: "An A to Z of Brexit. Cathartic fragments, pessimistic conjectures." Encyclopedic, but let's single out: "David Cameron is the worst post-war Prime Minister, a gambler without even the spine to bet his reputation (and the country's economy) on something he believed in."
Tony Karon: It's the end of the world as we know it -- again: "The Brexit result -- a vote of no-confidence in the elites of London and Brussels by an English working class that has been steadily marginalised over three decades -- underscores the peril that the system that has aggrandised those elites now faces through its failure to deliver economic security and dignity to millions of citizens." He mentions that economists have largely turned against austerity, and notes some opportunities for fruitful spending like the $3.6 trillion needed "to restore and modernise crumbling infrastructure [in the US] by 2020," adding that "Hillary Clinton proposes an infrastructure spend less than 10 per cent of what the Civil Engineers recommend; Mr Trump has offered no plan."
Paul Krugman: Brexit: The Morning After: "It seems clear that the European project -- the whole effort to promote peace and growing political union through economic integration -- is in deep, deep trouble." Also: The Macroeconomics of Brexit: Motivated Reasoning? "Economists have very good reasons to believe that Brexit will do bad things in the long run, but are strongly tempted to sex up their arguments by making very dubious claims about the short run." Still, Dean Baker has some quibbles about Krugman's claims (see Paul Krugman, Brexit, and Bubbles): namely, he suspects London is enjoying a real estate bubble that Brexit is likely to pop . . . and, well, you know how that goes.
Alex Massie: Is Brexit the beginning of the End of Britain?: Focuses mostly on Scotland, which voted against independence when threatened with exile from the UE, and voted heavily to remain in the EU. There are also similar feelings in Northern Ireland (where unification with Ireland would keep them in the EU) and even in Wales. But breaking up the UK may not be the only way out for Scotland; see Nicola Sturgeon: Scottish parliament could block Brexit.
Chris Patten: A British Tragedy in One Act: Quotes Churchill: "The trouble with committing political suicide is that you live to regret it."
John Pilger: A Blow for Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No to Europe: "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media." Depends on your point of view, but when you say no to the entire establishment, you're not necessarily just voting for a narrow flag-waving anti-immigrant platform (although Pilger ignores those who did just that).
Norman Pollack: Fissures in World Capitalism: The British Vote: "The elephant in the room is NATO. Obviously, the EU is its economic counterpart, and was never conceived in isolation as a mere trading bloc. With Britain out, hopefully others will follow, the EU will tighten its ship as an economic union and NATO, now presently at Russia's borders, will be forced to rethink its dangerous course." A referendum on British membership in NATO would have been more interesting, and indeed might have started a dissolution of an organization that these days serves mostly to entangle Europe in America's post-imperial wars. But my initial reaction was opposite of Pollack's: Brexit will push Britain even more into the US orbit, increasing its stake in subduing the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. One might hope that "old Europe" would respond by ditching NATO, but the EU has already followed NATO deep into "new Europe" and the latter are keen on poking the Russian Bear.
Randeep Ramesh: Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply: "The far right preys on the weakest members of society and by letting anti-immigrant rhetoric bed in we are eroding civil rights not strengthening them." I.e., a spike in such incidents led to Cameron condemns xenophobic and racist abuse after Brexit vote.
Jeffrey D Sachs: The Meaning of Brexit: "In Europe, the call to punish Britain pour encourager les autres -- to warn those contemplating the same -- is already rising. This is European politics at its stupidest (also very much on display vis-à-vis Greece)." Also, he points out that US foreign policy viz. Syria and Ukraine are much to blame for the crisis, and just falls short of pointing out that NATO is what Europe should be exiting. For more on "stupidest" politics, see European leaders rule out informal Brexit talks before article 50 is triggered.
George Soros: Brexit and the Future of Europe: "Now the catastrophic scenario that many feared has materialized, making the disintegration of the EU practically irreversible."
Andre Vltchek: Brexit -- Let the UK Screw Itself!: "Almost no commentator bothered to notice what was truly shocking about the entire referendum process: an absolute lack of progressive ideology, of internationalism and concern for the world as a whole. Both sides (and were there really two sides there) presented a fireworks of shallow selfishness and of pettiness. The profound moral corruption of the West was clearly exposed."
Paul Woodward: Who gets democracy?: A number of interesting points here. One that especially struck me: "Last Thursday, 2.7 million people who have made Britain their home were not allowed to vote because although they are EU citizens resident in an EU country, they are not British citizens." Don't you think people who are so affected by a vote should get to vote? Good chance that bloc would have swung the election. (FWIW, I also think that immigrants, at least the ones with legal jobs, should be able to vote in US elections: if you live and work somewhere, you are part of the public, and therefore a stake holder.)
Simon Wren-Lewis: The triumph of the tabloids: "Of course we should blame Johnson and Farage and the rest: the UK has paid a very high price to facilitate political ambition. Of course we should blame Cameron and Osborne for taking the referendum gamble and stoking anger with austerity. But a few politicians alone are not capable of fooling the electorate so consistently. To do that they need to control the means of communicating information."
Meanwhile, some short links on other subjects:
Patrick Cockburn: An Endless Cycle of Indecisive Wars: Tom Engelhardt's introduction cites a statistic that should help you understand Brexit: "If you want a single figure that catches the grim spirit of our moment, it's 65 million. That's the record-setting number of people that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates were displaced in 2015 by 'conflict and persecution,' one of every 113 inhabitants of the planet." Most of them result from the US/NATO wars against Islam, and I include Syria in that list, and as Cockburn shows, they keep getting worse because the US/NATO can't manage to bring them to any sort of conclusion, diplomatic or otherwise. And yes, here's another Brexit quote, restating what should by now be obvious:
The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have parallels with the Middle East: the free-market economic policies pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst for protest against the status quo. The anger of the "Leave" voters has much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United States.
Donald Cohen: The History of Privatization: Part 1 (of 4).
Thomas Frank: Worshipping Money in DC: Author of the best political book of 2016, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People, although you might consider holding off until after you vote for Hillary in November -- it offers few inducements to support her now, but will help you understand what went wrong after she's inaugurated. This piece is more on lobbying -- the principal subject of Frank's equally worthy 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, and of the newsletter Influence, extensively cited here. Conclusion: "This is not an industry, Influence's upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community -- a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class." I'll add that American politicians have always been easy to bribe, because they've never been very skeptical of hustlers out to make money -- that's just part of America's boom ethic. The only thing that's changed is the scale of the graft and how systematic it's become, plus how our campaign system selects for the best moneygrubbers.
Henry Grabar: Kansas' Insane Right-Wing Experiment Is About to Destroy Its Roads: Well, it is true that Kansas has been raiding the highway fund ever since Brownback blew a hole in the budget with his massive tax giveaways, and consequently new roads aren't being built and old roads aren't being maintained -- at least not at prudent levels. This is the sort of short-sighted policy that doesn't fully impact you right away: it takes time for weather and wear to break down those roads, but the toll accumulates until it does become catastrophic, at which point debt will make it even harder to address.
John Feffer: Donald Trump and America B: Actually, starts with recent elections in Poland which brought the reactionary PiS to power, arguing that shows a backlash by those left behind ("Poland B") by the urban neoliberals who have dominated Polish politics ("Poland A") -- a dynamic that is sweeping across Europe and finds an analog in the Trump bandwagon here. I don't know about Poland, but in the US I doubt Trump's supporters are that poor -- I've seen surveys that show them averaging about $20K above average US family income (whereas Sanders and Clinton run about even). This also ignores the growth of leftist parties in non-ex-communist states, especially ones crushed by austerity measures like Greece and Spain (but also within left-center parties, like Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US).
Elizabeth Kolbert: Drawing the Line: On gerrymandering old and new, especially the REDMAP project which was so successful for Republicans in 2010, as detailed in David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. "In House races in 2012, 1.7 million more votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans. And still, thanks to the way those votes were packed and cracked, Republicans came away with thirty-three more congressional seats."
Elizabeth Kolbert: Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change: Piece from May 5 -- a lot more burnt since then. More generally: "In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record."
Evan Osnos: Making a Killing: Useful brief history of (as the sub puts it) the business and politics of selling guns.
More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others -- the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.
None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events -- mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control -- gun sales have broken records. "You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there's a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy," Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.
Jeffrey Toobin: Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution: "The abortion dissent explains why Thomas is so cut off on the Court, even from his fellow-conservatives. He doesn't respect the Court's precedents. He is so convinced of the wisdom of his approach to the law that he rejects practically the whole canon of constitutional law." Toobin also quotes Scalia on how his judicial philosophy differed from Thomas's: "I'm an originalist," Scalia said, "but I'm not a nut."
Paul Waldman: Trump's response to terrorism is both weak and barbaric: "It seems that nothing is more horrifying to Donald Trump than the idea that somebody might be laughing at us, or more specifically, at him." Too much after that trying to cast GW Bush as an enlightened alternative ("a fatherly reassurance that their president would keep them safe"), but it's a measure of Trump's instability that makes such comparisons possible.
Julia Carrie Wong/Danny Yadron: Hillary Clinton proposes student debt deferral for startup founders: Worst faux pas (of its type) since Paul Ryan took Labor Day as an occasion to tout "America's job creators" deprecating the people who actually do the work to keep everything running. What was she thinking? That the people most able to repay their debts should be spared? That tomorrow's business leader should get a head start on sucking the public tit? That the people should subsidize MBA programs that teach young people to become sociopaths? Or just that, to agree with Ryan and Ayn Rand, entrepreneurs are so much better than everyone else? Surely she can't imagine that this will be a universal benefit, that it will lead to a world where everyone is an entrepreneur and no one actually has to do any work? Or maybe she just sees it as a cheap sop, as a way of shaming all those poor sods who went to college just to learn a trade, or worse still to learn liberal arts, to become more knowledgeable citizens, to contribute a little something to what we used to call civilization?
The authors quote Hillary: "I disagree with free college for everybody. I don't think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump's kids to college." Well, maybe Trump's kids should go to college -- especially if college meant something other than rubberstamping credentials (like, you know, learning how to get along and now just how to get ahead). And maybe if the public paid for it, Trump wouldn't be so motivated to grab money for his own personal aggrandizement (or if he still was, we'd be less relucatant to tax it back). A world where everyone, regardless of how rich or poor they start out, has the same opportunity to learn as much as they can would likely be much better than the one we live in now.
For more, see Rana Foroohar: Why Hillary Clinton's Student Debt Idea Is Smart, one of those pieces that exposes how ridiculous Clinton's program is by assuming it's brilliant. In particular:
Start-ups are a key driver of productivity. But the birthrate of startups has been in decline since the 1970s. Since then, it has dovetailed with a shift in how the financial sector business model works -- it no longer invests primarily in new business, but rather buys up and trades existing assets, and funding for small and mid-sized start ups is still scarce (while increasing monopoly power on the part of large firms squashes new ones, as Robert Reich and others have recently written.)
And how exactly is a modest tax incentive (debt deferral) going to fix these problems? If monopoly power is the problem (and it's certainly a big one), the classic remedy is antitrust enforcement, and I'd add that it's also important to open up ways to provide financing and build capital that bypass the exclusive control of predatory financiers. You also need to look hard at what finance does, and undercut the rewards of bad short-term behavior even if you can't figure out how to reward long-term productive investment -- as it is the financial sector is sucking up far too much money, so you need to both that less likely and tax it away when it happens. Also, another thing that has been driving productivity down "since the 1970s" has been the decline of worker control, so that, too, is something to direct policy at promoting. Clinton's proposal hardly even amounts to a gesture against these problems. Rather, it hints that she's still in thrall to the high-tech is going to save the world from endemic corruption. This is actually a common myth in New Democratic circles -- a major theme in Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal.
Meanwhile, the evidence on using tax incentives to influence business behavior is pretty damning. This came as no surprise to me. From the beginning I thought that every "incentive" was a distortion leading to warped thought. In 1984 I was looking for a job. I recall driving up I-93 from Boston with a headhunter who pointed out Compugraphic's various buildings along the route and explained the tax advantages of each. When I arrived at corporate headquarters I found that most of the managers actually lived in "tax-free New Hampshire," and several explained that matters most isn't income, it's after-tax profits. I knew then the company was doomed, and indeed it was. But they were spouting "truths" that were clichés at the time, spread hither and yon by the business press, so my judgment wasn't just limited to this one company: I figured the whole economy was doomed, if not to the tragedy of the Great Depression then at least to the farce we've lived through ever since the 1980s, occasionally propped up then blown apart by increasingly desperate bubbles.