AN ELEGY TO A LOST OPPORTUNITY: Most clear thinking would agree.
HUMOR ROCKS: These cartoons are universally and uniformly fun.
SHE GETS IT:Extremely credible yonng woman.
DAVID STOCKMAN IS AN AUSTRIAN:Watch out below.
THIS FROM AMERICAN INTEREST PUBLICATION HITS THE MARK:
The pros and cons of Brexit are complicated; reasonable people could and did disagree. But what was most interesting was the reaction to a vote outcome unpredicted by the pollsters or, just as important these days, the betting parlors. In London, and throughout most of Britain’s upper-middle class world, the quality press, and the political establishment—the Great and the Good, in short—the result was not disappointment but curious combination of despair, hysteria, and quiet elation.
Much of the outcry against Brexit was not merely despondent, but, as my Twitter feed revealed, unqualified in its belief that the vote was a catastrophe. Equally unambiguous was the contempt expressed for those on the other side. The professors, business people, and journalists making remarks about the “lizard brain of the British people” had no visible inclination to do what some American conservatives appalled by the rise of Trump have realized they need to do, namely, figure out why a majority of their countrymen went for a choice they consider dangerously crazy.
What also appeared was a manifestation of a nasty class-based bigotry, as acid and ugly as anything an 18th-century aristocrat might have expressed for an uppity cobbler who presumed to have a political opinion. It was manifested most clearly, in London at any rate, by the gilded young who immediately began snarling at the old and the working class who voted for Brexit, and talking—emptily, most likely—about leaving London for elsewhere.
The larger phenomenon here, however, is a crisis not of ignorant masses, but of elites who have failed. All societies, except perhaps the Greek city-states of antiquity, are led by elites or, as the great sociologist Digby Baltzell described them, establishments. As long as they provide their societies with some consequential benefit (prosperity, success in war, or political leadership), can absorb talented non-elite members, and display virtues that the rest of society values (public service, self-sacrifice, or military courage) they deserve to hang on and do.
The elites of London, like those of this country and large parts of the Western world, appear in many ways to have failed those tests. The crash of 2008 crystallized a view of the financial class in particular as reckless, self-dealing manipulators. As Joel Kotkin among others has pointed out, by virtue of how our education systems have evolved, elite youth increasingly marry one another, and the prosperous can (and do) give their children every leg up—which poorer parents cannot hope to match. Meanwhile, the political and intellectual elites deserve, and receive, very little credit for patriotism or courage, because they do not exhibit much. As manifested on campuses in Great Britain as here, they increasingly show themselves intolerant of dissenting opinions, and inclined to bully because they have forgotten (or never learned) how to argue.
The failure of courage, Solzhenitsyn said at a particularly dark point in the Cold War, was in danger of becoming a distinguishing feature of the West. The young people who talked petulantly of abandoning their country because of a vote they did not like were bright graduates of the best universities in the English-speaking world—and severely deficient in pluck. They had no notion of that patriotism which says that when your country is in trouble, you are supposed to fight it out, not begin checking to see if Morgan Stanley is hiring in Madrid. They are not fit to be trusted with political power.
And in the very intemperateness of their reaction lies one of the best reasons to think that Brexit is, with all its hazards, a good thing.
LIAR LIAR PANTSUIT ON FIRE:Phew
RELEVANT REFERENCE TO F.SCOTT FITZGERALD:They are truly trailer park trash people.
THE ELITES DON'T GET IT: IT may be their power, wealth and influence is such they don't need to get it. Until they need to like when the money runs out.
