A 2nd Brexit Referendum Once Seemed Unthinkable. Now Support Is Growing
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/18/677783499/a-2nd-brexit-referendum-once-seemed-unthinkable-now-support-is-growing
Yes, Brexit was a bad choice.
From the beginning I've viewed Brexit as functionally impossible, unless Britain wanted an interminable period of hard suffering which I'm sure the addlepates never anticipated.
For populists, "purity of principle" is both sine qua non and summum bonum.
If only one's ideals are lofty enough, God's Invisible Hand -- ex machina -- will provide all that is good.
It never occurs to them that 750 years of Dark Age ensued the Christian conversion of Rome.
There are times when the common root of "Christian" and "cretin" are apropos.
If only one's ideals are lofty enough, God's Invisible Hand -- ex machina -- will provide all that is good.
It never occurs to them that 750 years of Dark Age ensued the Christian conversion of Rome.
There are times when the common root of "Christian" and "cretin" are apropos.
In the late '70s, I lived a year in Liverpool.
What surprised me most was the similarity between Britain and Uncle Sam's structured degradation -- if not brutalization -- of the working class.
Of course, the existence of National Health is an exception to this general rule.
But when National Health was founded in 1948 England was still infused with a sense of noblesse oblige and it is likely (perhaps even "decided") that National Health had a deep root in the solidarity created by Britain's class-defying "common cause" in World War II when -- battered by blitzkrieg in 1940-41 -- it seemed Hitler would annex the island as a permanent possession. (Foolishly, Adolf opened another front and "the rest was history.")
Given the woeful treatment of the working class in both countries -- mostly manifest in the assumption that workers would not educate themselves (and indeed did not need education) I see Brexit's "yes vote" and Trump's kindred "election" (largely by the uneducated) as thick-skulled Anglo-Saxon populism at its worst.
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