USA TODAY
Britain's forgotten voters — and ours
Britain's forgotten voters — and ours
By Glenn
Harlan Reynolds
America, too, is
experiencing a populist upheaval, of which Donald Trump’s candidacy is more of
a symptom than a cause.
So the post-Brexit
number-crunching is over and it turns out that the decisive support for
Britain’s leaving the EU came not from right-wing nationalists but from working-class
Labour voters. This offers some lessons for British and European politicians —
and for us in America, too.
Much of Britain’s
prosperity in recent years has centered on London, which has done very well and
become very pleased with itself. As Peter Mandler writes in Dissent,
this turned out to be a problem. London occupies a huge place in British
society — as if Washington, D.C., New York, Hollywood, and perhaps Silicon
Valley were all in the same place. But that leaves the rest of the country
feeling somewhat left out, and deeply suspicious of the people running things,
especially as the people running things seem to hold the rest of the country in
contempt, openly mocking the traditional, the middle-class, the
non-Metropolitan.
Mandler writes,
“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.”
The result, Mandler
writes, is that “For the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded,
not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but
more crucially from power. . . . A majority of people around the United Kingdom
are feeling like non-people, un-citizens, their lives jerked about like
marionettes by wire-pullers far away. In those circumstances, very bad things
indeed can be expected.”
Given a chance, these
people seized an opportunity to give the wires a yank of their own. A lot of
people felt powerless, and the political system not only didn’t address that, but
seemed to glory in it.
But will leaders
learn the lesson? It seems doubtful. As Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle observed
about the post-Brexit reaction, they mostly seemed to double down. “The
inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment has
been on full display on social media. Journalists and academics seemed to
feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open
borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes
on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly
this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down.
. . . Or perhaps they were just unable to grasp what I noted in a column
last week: that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this
at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some
elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment — a
nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll
happily swap it for a new one. In many ways, members of the global
professional class have started to identify more with each other than they
have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional
meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.”
America, of course,
faces the same kind of division, as Dana Loesch writes in her new book, Flyover
Nation: You Can’t Run A Country You’ve Never Been To. Every once in a
while, she notes, a publisher or a newspaper from a coastal city will send a
reporter, like an intrepid African explorer of the 19th century, to report on
the odd beliefs and doings of the inhabitants of the interior. But even the
politicians who represent Flyover Country tend to spend most of their time —
and, crucially, their post-elective careers — in Washington, DC.
Over the past few
decades, Washington has gone from a sleepy town with restaurants and real
estate priced to fit a civil servant’s salary to a glittering city with
prices that match a K street lobbyist’s salary. The disconnect from regular
Americans is much greater. And the public expressions of contempt toward ordinary
Americans — Loesch’s book collects quite a few — make things much, much worse.
America, too, is
experiencing a populist upheaval, of which Donald Trump’s candidacy is more of
a symptom than a cause. It seems unlikely that the political elites of Britain
and the EU will take the Brexit vote as encouragement to raise their game. Will
America’s political class do better? I hope so, but I’m not optimistic.
Glenn
Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor
and the author of The
New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from
Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
