Megan McCardle remarks about Brexit in her Washington Post column:
For the record, I think the outcome of Brexit is likely to be quite unhappy for Britain and for the “Leave†voters who expect it to improve their lives. My support for following through with it rests entirely on H.L. Mencken’s bitter proverb, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.â€
Coldblooded, I know. But let me join May in asking: What’s the alternative?
To answer that question, consider the French “yellow vest†protesters revolting against President Emmanuel Macron’s bloodless technocratism — or look closer to home, where much of America’s educated professional class is in a perpetual stew about President Trump’s violations of democratic norms.
Frankly, I’m stewing about them myself — boiling over, really. But I’ve had to reckon with readers who support Trump and are unmoved by my pleas about the sanctity of democratic proceduralism.
To them, all those sacred procedures are the way that insiders rig the game against outsiders such as themselves. Insiders may throw around phrases such as “the rule of law,†but in the end, what constitutes a violation of those rules is decided by a tiny class of judges and politicians, abetted by professional commentators. Like any hometown ref, outsiders say, the insiders call all the close ones in favor of their own class — or, for the ones that aren’t close, the rules can be rewritten on the fly.
It’s hard to deny that the sentiment has a grain of truth. Not when those elites respond to populist insurgencies by questioning the legitimacy of a presidential election conducted under long-standing rules, or by threatening to hold Brexit do-overs until the voters fall in line. Call me naive, but I think that when a populist campaign against self-dealing insiders starts smashing up your politics, the most important thing those insiders can do is not prove them right.
I only have two things to add. There is a pattern we have seen over and over again in Illinois. An individual attends a mediocre law school, get himself or herself elected to public office while retaining a connection with his or her small undistinguished law firm, and holds elective office for twenty, thirty years, somehow emerging at the end of that process a multi-millionaire. I do not think it’s too much to suggest there’s something wrong with that picture. Political officeholders are political officeholders. They are not the best or the brightest. They are not “our betters”.
Second, the European Union is a fraud and always has been. It is primarily a means for subsidizing German manufacturers and French farmers at the expense of farmers and manufacturers in the other countries of the EU. Giving it credit for keeping the peace is arrant nonsense. Would that peace have existed without the U. S. military looming over it? I’m skeptical.
George Will recently posted a column that claimed that the EU started as a free trade zone, and then transitioned to an attack on direct democracy that seemed cribbed from the last time he wrote about a California referendum.
The first point is demonstrably false, but it is true that the government sold the British public on the benefits of trade access to the relatively fast growing Continental economies and concealed the commitment to “ever closer union.” Upon joining the EEC, the Continent’s economy collapsed sending the UK into its worst economic contraction since WWII.
On the second point, parliamentary supremacy means power delegated by the People to the legislature cannot be passed to another. This is entirely different than setting policy through referenda; joining the EU means your elected legislator no longer has any voice in agricultural, fishing and industrial policy. Referenda were the means to legitimize delegation to non-elected, non-English bureaucracies. If France (and the Netherlands) hadn’t rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, the UK would have rejected it as well. The policy of avoidance by piecemeal transfer of power to the EU did not make the problem disappear.
All of which to say is that I disagree with McMegan’s initial framing that Leave voters necessarily expect BREXIT to improve their lives. The EU is a basked of unpopular policies, the greatest of which is the impingement on self-governance; all of which the British were willing to accept if the financial rewards were great.
And the point I was trying to make is that, for most of the countries of the EU, the promise of financial rewards is and always has been a fraud. It’s a promise of financial rewards to key constituencies in Germany and France and to bureaucrats.
I think that Mr. Will is more Hamiltonian in his approach to government than Jeffersonian.