Brexit & EU, Hillary & Trump, Obsessions with an "Alternate Reality"

Upset about Brexit

Since the people of Britain voted by a 4% margin to take the enormous cultural, economic, and geopolitical step of leaving the EU last week, my Facebook feed and daily news perusal has been deluged by lamentations.  Practically no sources I run across apparently find common cause with Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and the most prominent generative force behind Brexit (or at least, none of them want to say so on Facebook).

Some of the lamentations are connected to the vote as a harbinger of a turn away from an open society; others are concerned about the racial-cultural backlash against the increasing number of inhabitants of the British Isles who are not as WASPy as those whose grandparents grew up there; and indeed others are gloomy about the economic fallout likely to damage the future of Britain, Europe, and maybe the world.  I found myself pretty sympathetic to these anxieties.

Brexit in UK = Trump in US?

Another trope of fear, however, was that somehow the narrow win for Brexit will prove to be a leading indicator or perhaps even a causal factor Donald Trump's incipient victory in the US presidential election this November.  I found myself less sympathetic to this direction of worried reasoning and added my own scrap of kindling to the Facebook fires by reminding to my friend that:

"The United States is not Britain,"

"A referendum is nothing like a presidential election (especially considering our country's Electoral College," and, most importantly,

"And Hillary Clinton is, I promise you, not the European Union," notwithstanding spite of any current conspiracy theories that she is no longer a human woman married to Bill Clinton, but rather a practically pan-European intergovernmental organization constituting 27 or 28 nation-states and run by bureaucrats out of the same place that used to administer the Belgian Congo (and with an eerily similar flag to that last and most brutal instance of colonial exploitation).

But seriously, aren't people mad at the establishment in similar ways on both sides of The Pond?

As against my dismissive Facebook response, there is an obvious and serious concern that the Brexit "phenomenon," which is now an electoral reality, emerges from the same kinds of dissatisfaction with the globalized pattern of increasing income inequality & stagnation that we see as strongly in the US:  The "haves" (whether they be the 1% or the the 30%)  have more & more, and the have-nots increasingly find that the storied economic mobility of free, capitalist democracies has gone the way of the cassette tape, disappearing sometime around the end of the last century.

In the end, though, patterns of party competition in this country, the Clinton campaign's advantage in financial and human resources (not quite as many bureaucrats as in Brussels, but almost), and the slow but steady dawning on more Americans that her fellow Democrat Barack Obama's stewardship of the White House has been a good thing, convince me of the position of Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik's analysis: "The 2016 election is already decided. History says Hillary Clinton wins."

The real problem: Nobody thought about the Possibility that became Reality

And yet, there is an important and upsetting similarity between Brexit & the US presidential election, though not so immediately dangerous one (at least, to my own normative view of the world).  That's the apparent broad obsession that people in politics, media, and indeed in their own conversations, have with dwelling upon, discussing, and opining about the way the world will not be the day after the vote.

In the long leadup to the Brexit vote, a lot of people were generally worried about Brexit, while in the last couple of days beforehand a few opinion polls showing that Brits would vote narrowly to "Remain" made people (especially financial trader people) increasingly confident that the next day, Britain would still have a future in the EU.

But it turned out otherwise, and indeed, it turned out that even the people leading the charge for Brexit had no idea what that would mean.  As a British friend of mine echoed on Facebook in the days since, "they had no plan."  In fact, now we have a state of reality where the British Prime Minister is a lame duck, the most prominent Brexit-promoter in his own party Boris Johnson (who'd been the odds-on favorite to succeed him) has pulled his hat out of the ring to be the next PM, and there's no certainty who will be the UK's leader in two months' time.  Moreover, nobody knows when the all-important Article 50 will be "triggered" to begin the formal negotiations on Britain's new status vis-à-vis the EU.  And to help matters, the UK's opposition party appears to be entering a slow-motion leadership struggle of its own with nobody quite certain who will succeed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn himself refusing to go gentle into that good night even as the great majority of Labour MPs want him out.

This enormous degree of uncertainty about very important things--and the implicit the failure of powerful people, who have a lot to lose or gain, to have lined up support or come up with a plan of what to do if Brexit won seems to suggest that most British elites--and perhaps even most Brits--were so preoccupied by the way world would (as it turned out) not be the next morning (ie, they all just thought Britain would still be in the EU), they'd devoted little or none of their brainpower to what to do in the case that eventually prevailed as reality:  Where, in truth, can we see the "Reality Based Community" among Britain's leaders, media, or pundits in the run-up to Brexit?

Indeed, the fact that it was such a near vote in the end could perhaps partially excuse the apparent failure to consider "now what happens?" beforehand.  (Though it was also a near thing whether Hitler would have invaded the UK during WWII, or whether the US would confront a Soviet satellite 90 miles off the Florida coast during the Cold War--obviously the former didn't happen, and the latter did--but would it be forgivable if, respectively, UK & US leaders, media, & pundits failed to consider "what happens now" in the alternative of either of those scenarios?)

In the US, obsession with what probably won't become reality threatens to leave us, as a polity, as flat-footed as Brexit leaders

Now we begin to see the parallel with the United States.  For a long time, I personally had been really hoping that the reality this coming November 9th would be Bernie Sanders headed to the Oval Office.  I had to give that up several weeks ago, and join what now appears to be the Reality Based Community that his opponent will quite probably be the president-elect.

But that's a hard to community in which to find any conversation--most of the news media (2/3 of WaPo's front page this morning, 3/4 of Bloomberg Politics, and almost all of NYT's political coverage) are preoccupied with the man who will mostly likely not be elected president, as they and have been unswervingly for the past twelve months.

Even a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Democratic Party of Virginia's state Convention in Richmond, state party leaders from Governor Terry McAuliffe to our Democratic congressmen, down to the merest party functionaries allowed on stage spent far more time talking about Donald Trump than about Hillary Clinton--they even made us watch a video of the most appalling things he's said (as if Democratic delegates were likely to be uninformed about him).  A few people said they loved Bernie (though the tokenism of the comment was as bald as Yul Brynner), and lectured us on how important it was to get Hillary elected, but nobody said anything about what policies she would put in place in the (quite likely real future) even of her being elected president.

And try finding anything from prominent news outlets about what life will be like in America where Hillary Clinton is president--you'll need magnifying glasses and forensic training.  I don't doubt a Hillary will generally undertake policies that I, as a Democrat, would favor, and she's not trying to keep her plans or their details a secret, by any means.  But somehow, almost nobody in the Public Sphere seems inclined to discuss what the next Clinton presidency will be like.  And those who do want to talk about it are mostly wanting tell us how horrible it will be, for example, to have the country run by criminals.

Is this dangerous?  In this particular case, I doubt it--I think the reality we'll be living in starting November 9th will probably be as good as can be expected from the American political system.

But in general, the propensity for us--especially our media & leaders--to ignore in public discourse the way the world really is (or is likely to be) in favor of what is less likely to actually prevail in reality (in the event, Brexit), or even what is fantastical (Donald Trump's presidency), is a huge problem.  I'll forbear speculating on the root of it, but it's something that must change if we're not to be caught as flat-footed by major (and often predictable) world events (climate change comes to mind most quickly, but it's hardly the one!) as Brexit's leaders have been by getting what they wanted!