Lileks on Brexit
24th June 2016
In case you’re wondering, I would have voted to Leave, based on a superficial analysis from the other side of the globe. It’s the idea of being a nation that answers to itself. I can understand wanting to join a common economic community. But when people you didn’t elect pass a law affecting the strength of your hairdryer to lessen energy consumption and prevent the planet from having a mean temperature of 156 degrees C by 3047, and there’s nothing you can do, people get peeved. Of course nationalism has its excesses. But the excesses of transnationalism are accumulated incrementally and smother all differences, and for people who are constantly droning on about diversity they seem dreadfully keen to impose a bland uniformity of laws. Culture survives for a while, but eventually the laws are your culture.
This same relationship is what caused the American Civil War, and poisons relations with the Federal government even today.
How you regard the Brexit as an American might say something about how you view the role of government, and the efficacy and desirability of international organizations. There’s a certain Star-Trekky well of course attitude towards international organizations, as though they are insulated from the poisons of tribalism and hence rational, wise bodies that make proper decisions based on The Good of the Many. But it depends on what they believe, and what they want, no? The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there’s one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they’d love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.
I think it pretty obvious that this is Obama’s attitude, and Hillary’s.