Ideas travel, both the bad and the good. One is shared by two life-long members of the ruling class, Hillary Clinton, standard-bearer of the Democratic party, and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, two politicians who feel threatened by the new revolt of the masses.
Here in America, Hillary Clinton expected a flower- (well, cash-) strewn path to the White House, but suddenly discovered that there are millions of voters who neither like nor trust her. They might even vote for the usurper, Donald Trump, who has not paid his dues by alternating campaigns for office with appointments to prestige-heavy bureaucratic positions, instead of building businesses and creating jobs. These hordes, Clinton says, number in the millions and are a “basket of deplorables“, the most common synonyms for which are disgraceful, shameful, dishonorable, unworthy, inexcusable, unpardonable, and unforgivable. Their crime is to believe that they all matter, or should, and that they have been hard done by the class of which Mrs. Clinton is a leading member.
On to the European Union. Juncker, one of the EU bureaucrats sporting the title of president—the bloated EU bureaucracy has several presidents of its various arms, all of whom show up to greet the visiting president of an independent country—is upset that Britain has chosen Brexit rather than continue to submit to the stream of regulations he churns out, or accommodate the immigrants that membership in the EU would require. The problem, he told an audience in Cyprus gathered for his annual State of the Union speech Wednesday, is the rise of “galloping populism… we need … to protect ourselves against it.” It is unclear who “we” is, but it surely is not the galloping populists from whom Juncker & Co. wish to protect themselves—which is why these servants of the vision of a united Europe, devoid of boundaries between nations, repeatedly decline to allow them to vote on key issues. “There are too many areas where … national interests are brought to the fore,” said Juncker, a complaint not very different from President Obama’s preference for norm-setting international institutions and rejecting American exceptionalism.
Britain gave its voters a choice, and the deplorable galloping populists on that side of the ocean told establishment politicians that enough is enough: We want our voices heard over the regulation setting, unaccountable bureaucrats that form Juncker’s army. Whether our very own “deplorable”, “galloping” populists will make a similar statement come Election Day is deemed unlikely—just as a majority vote for Brexit was considered unthinkable by the U.K. establishment.
