© Dave Kellam / CC BY SA 2.0
In many ways, I reserve judgment. This will cause no small amount of heartache, but then the event of the referendum itself, without reference to any particular outcome, was already the harbinger of heartaches-to-come, largely unavoidable. The referendum did not create either the sentiments or the disagreements that led to them.
Either way, it would have been bad for the United Kingdom, and bad for Europe. This way, it will also be bad for many immigrants. The New Statesman said that the referendum opened the “Pandora’s Box,” but in fact the global elites have been slowly opening the Pandora’s Box for a quarter century or longer.
It’s a crisis of the West in general; one referendum wasn’t going to avert the crisis, no matter the outcome. The crisis marches on to bigger and better (or, indeed, worse) things in the years and decades to come, and I’m not entirely sure there is anything to do about it.
The West is in regrettable decline. Left and right are both gone mad. All good things must end.
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What is interesting to me about the referendum, when I step back a bit, is the fact that it will actually have an effect in the real world at all—that the votes and the outcome might, shock of shocks, matter.
Certainly no vote anywhere in almost any nation has mattered all that much for quite a long time.
Yes, yes, some percentage of the population hobbles over to the polls a few times every decade here and there, in country after country and they pull the lever for this or for that, for something or for other, knowing full well that whichever side wins and whichever side loses, nothing at all is likely to change.
Options have been severely limited; voters choose between six of one and a half dozen of the other, then watch as either the six or the half dozen compound the insult by pretending as if no one had voted anyway. Meanwhile, those of “the consensus” have satisfied themselves with “consensus” as an explanation for all of this, while at the same time taking care to keep pulling the strings that matter, just in case.
This has been the game of the global elite for some time, and the secret meaning behind Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” some years ago. Eventually he had the good sense to walk this claim back, realizing that all had been fortunate that it’s real meaning hadn’t been discerned. A little embarrassment and a harrumph or two and it was all put to bed and thank God anyway.
But here we have a population who was allowed to actually make a choice that matters and between two actually different options.
Who went and resurrected democracy? And on whose authority? How was this allowed to happen? And might not the plebes now, having had a taste of it again, begin to demand more?
No wonder everyone is upset at Cameron.
And the United States is ripe for precisely the same kind of unpredictable eruption of actuality after a great period of denial. Both Sanders and Trump are latent evidence of this. I suspect that these two aren’t the end of things but rather the beginning of them, particularly now that “consensus” in the form of Clinton has won.
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My thoughts are with all of those that will be negatively impacted by this outcome. And for all of those that would have been negatively impacted by the other outcome.
But not with those who were to be fine no matter the outcome. They are the ones, meant to be the leaders of things, who are most responsible now for the state of things.
