Where were you when Britain voted to drop out of the European Union?
It isn’t like 9/11. Not exactly a searing shock. Rather one of those queasy moments when you feel the bedrock wobble, the times shift.
Do you remember? Here’s a hint: June 2016. I happened to be in Washington, D.C., visiting my older son. Getting the news amid the white marble Roman splendor of our nation’s capital might have helped seal it in memory.
As did the news itself: Britain was bailing out of the European Union, tired of living in an interconnected modern world where olive oil standards might be set somewhere else. Plus open borders, while convenient for you, also meant some foreign person could come to your country, where they don’t belong.
Not that I cared much about British politics. Rather, I saw the vote as tea leaves indicating where our country was heading come that November.
Or as I wrote on my blog three days later:
“The news filled with the spectacle of a nation submitting to xenophobia and fear, leaping off a cliff at the behest of mavericks who had no plan other than to trash the system and see what happens next. It’s like burning down your home to marvel at the pretty fire. And I couldn’t help but feel: we’re next. ..it was scary to walk through these wide federal plazas, with their gleaming beige stone buildings. To think, ‘This is the Department of Commerce that Donald Trump will be responsible for. This is the White House where he will live.’
“With the bad news from Britain, as the country, in an act of collective derangement it instantly regretted, voted to be a smaller, more cut off and less prosperous nation, it was easy to suspect we had now entered a world gone mad, that the populist rage that has for so long simmered under our politics had truly exploded. . . Brexit is strike two... Will Trump be strike three?”
Nailed that one, unfortunately. Though Trump has not been as bad as feared then. When I asked my boy interning in Washington why he wasn’t that alarmed about Trump, he replied, “The institutions are strong.” And they have been, in the main. While individual Republican leaders line up to stain themselves with the deathless shame of cowardice, treason and abnegation of every moral value they once flaunted, there has been institutional resistance. By the courts. By the bureaucracy. By Congress — the impeachment process, if nothing else, distracted Trump from doing greater damage. The media has never been so important, alas.
So if the first Brexit vote was a glimpse into the future, can Thursday’s British election also be considered augury? It’s murkier this time. Britain has a parliamentary system, remember, so it wasn’t Prime Minister Boris Johnson running against challenger Jeremy Corbyn but Johnson’s Conservatives versus Corbyn’s Labor. Johnson promised to leave the EU by any means necessary. “Get Brexit done!” is his slogan. Corbyn could lead to a reversal of the Brexit vote. Of course it isn’t as simple as that. Both men are wildly unpopular. Johnson is an erratic, pathological liar on a Trumpian scale
”He lied about hospitals, nurses, Brexit being done, fact-checking, the economy...,” one British wit tweeted. “... lied to the Queen, even lied about lying. And still might win. “
But Corbyn is a Trump-level fan of dictators who can’t shake off accusations of anti-Semitism.
”On Friday the 13th,” The Economist mourned, “unlucky Britons will wake to find one of these horrors in charge.”
Tuck that thought away, in case November finds Trump going up against Bernie Sanders. Not that I wouldn’t take the latter in a heartbeat, the way Corbyn, despite all his flaws, still seems a better choice than Johnson on Brexit alone.
But anybody believing that giving Trump the bum’s rush will solve our country’s woes is not paying attention. We are seeing a systemic failure of political intellect, a rise in nationalism and what can only be called irrationalism.
We need to remember the choices. We can live in a fact-based system, where commerce, ideas and people flow freely across borders. Or we can live in a nationalist nightmare of tariffs, doublespeak and religious bans. We’ve taken our modern world for granted. Now we’re in danger of losing it.
