Great Britain has voted to leave the EU and that may, or may not, be a good thing. Too soon to tell, as they say. Unless, that is, you are part of the elite media or the establishment left in which case, you know exactly. And these people, of course, are always right about these things.
Just ask them.
It is interesting to note how viscerally those who pride themselves on their cool, impartial, educated rationality reacted to the vote. Their emotional afterburners kicked in immediately and they went supersonic. Not just in their anger over the vote’s repudiation of their common view of how the world should be organized and run (by them) in the age of globalization. But also in their loathing and disdain for the people who had done this. For the herd of common working trash.
Even if one concedes that the vote was of critical importance for the world (or even just Europe) and a setback on the road to earthly paradise, it probably wasn’t quite as momentous as Ian Bremmer of Time saw it: “…the most significant political risk the world has experienced since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
We are, one thinks, probably not 36 hours away from a nuclear war over Brexit. The commissars of Belgium will no longer be dictating to the grocers of Southhampton on the permissible shape of imported bananas, and nobody will be going down into the shelters over that.
Even if there were nuclear war over Brexit, who would nuke whom? The Brits have the bomb and so do the French. But the Germans? Nein. And you can’t have a proper European war without German participation.
Still, war talk was on all manner of lips. Even on those of Bernie Sanders, who had campaigned for many of the themes that are embedded in the Brexit vote, like backing off on trade and immigration. One suspects that a lot of Brexit voters would be Sanders supporters if they were transported to the U.S. Still, the Senator said that, “What worries me very much is the breaking down of international cooperation. Europe in the 20th century, as we all know, the kind of blood that was shed there was unimaginable. You never want to see that again.”
No, you surely don’t. And the possibility appears … well, remote. Germany manufactures dishonest cars these days; not tanks.
The argument (if it can be called that) that Brexit is somehow prelude to war is barren and one suspects that even those who make it, like Senator Sanders, don’t really believe it. What they object to is the repudiation of their tribe.
And by people whom they consider to be yahoos, plebes, and … well, to use the word they employed most often in the aftermath of the vote: “xenophobes.”
Sally Kohn, of CNN, immediately tweeted, “Okay, xenophobic exclusionary nationalism. You won a few fights today. But you will lose in the long run.”
The charge was also dressed up in fancy diction, as in an op-ed in the LA Times where the authors wrote:
Interesting that the Brexit vote, which was a repudiation of the status quo and, thus, by definition, a leap into the unknown was somehow motivated by a fear of change. The people who most fear change, it seems, are those most deeply invested in present arrangements. Which is to say, the globalizing elite.
So they lash out and do their “xenophobe” chant almost as though it is an incantation.
Vice-President Biden, in a speech in Ireland, warned of leaders “… peddling xenophobia, nationalism, and isolationism.” And he wasn’t just talking about the UK.
But it was in the media that the wails were the loudest and most piteous. Before the vote, Christine Amanpour was delivering dark warnings of “Leave movements … led by the hard-right, very, very xenophobic, anti-immigrant, very populist, nationalist, white identity politics.”
Only three uses of “very.” Kind of weak, given the momentous nature of the vote.
And when the results were in and official, Amanpour kicked into overdrive, explaining to her viewers that the vote was a result of “… white identity and xenophobia.”
That word, again.
There are many, many other examples. T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner gathered a sampling and to read it is to take some measure of solace. When there is this much agreement among elite media types, it almost always turns out they they are wrong.
And count on this: When it turns out they are proven wrong, they will still be there, explaining and … blaming the rest of us.
