So I wrote a long and winding version of my reflections on Brexit for Law and Liberty. It features both spunk and gratuitous nudity.
It’s only natural, especially this time of year, that many commentators have compared Brexit with the American Declaration of Independence, both the classic statement and the revolutionary act.
Well, it’s not much of a comparison. The British people haven’t put their lives, fortune, and sacred honor on the line. Well, maybe some small percentage of their fortunes.
Still, this is a perfectly legal secession. You can argue that it’s an option that had to be chosen before the possibility of peaceful secession closed down. It’s also one that might make secession fashionable, beginning with Scotland and the British part of Ireland. The imperial outreach of the British people over the centuries might be reduced to Wales and a few other insignificant outposts.
Some are saying this is nothing like 1776. Our Founders were all about maximizing free trade and the protection of natural rights. They were classical liberals. And voting Leave wasn’t a classically liberal choice.
There’s some truth to that, although classical liberals are split over Brexit, as I explain in the essay. Tyler Cowen, let me add here, was against Brexit, and sometimes he appears to have the soul of a tourist all the way down. But even he saw there was something good in the choice for historic England.
Let’s get back to honor. Those who say this is nothing like 1776 forget, as both the Declaration and The Federalist show, that the American Founders were driven by an alternative determination to make an experiment in self-government succeed. Insofar as Brexit is about self-government and the genuine consent of the government — as well as even about no taxation without representation — it’s something like 1776. There’s something irreducibly republican about the choice for politics over administration.
Anyway, I have no position on how people across the pond should have voted in this referendum.
More and more of our fashionable liberal commentators are saying something like this: The world is now divided into reasonable pragmatists — our natural aristocracy of wealth and virtue — and people so full of anger and animosity that they’ve gone insane. Most people these days need to get sedated. So far our cognitive elite hasn’t developed the big data and the devices of manipulation to get that done.
I don’t think most Trump voters are insane or even evil. It would be better if our Republican Party were an organized body of thought and action dominated by pragmatic leaders who could choose against the buffoon Trump, even now.
But I also think most of our so-called reasonable pragmatists — our experts — these days have the souls of tyrants (see higher education, for example), and it’s no wonder that they rouse up the spirit of liberty.
And voting for Trump is really not much at all like voting for Brexit. We postmodern conservatives notice that our favorite European thinkers — Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent — were for it. Those are the guys we recognize as natural aristocrats. That doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong, as they may (or may not) have been this time.
Well, here’s one similarity. There’s no denying that many British voters chose Leave to send a message to their clueless establishment. And they might have been a bit surprised to see that their spirited choice now has to be implemented.
And some similarly motivated Trump voters might be a bit surprised that he’s now the actual presumptive Republican nominee. And who knows about November?