The elites of my world – the transnationalprofessionals – are apoplectic at Brexit and the slight victory the other day of British nationals over the internationalists. Ms. McArdle in her article from Bloomberg, reproduced below, could not have said it better: The elites are stuck and have nowhere to go.
I thought I would put this up on my blog while giving her complete and total credit for what follows. I own none of it, except that it captures my sentiment two days after Brexit won over the Remain constituency, the latter of which is today rioting for a new referendum. Why is it that the leftists riot but the conservatives take their lumps quietly?
I was on a hike yesterday and overhead one of the academics who was out with us, say, “Brexit was a triumph of what Trump stands for: Closed borders and Racism.” My God – is that what the academics really think? Do they not have any sense whatsoever of “country”? Of course they do not. What the left cannot win at the ballot box, they will seek by undoing the ballot box altogether. Pure academics – pure unadulterated leftists – are the most dangerous kind, and suffer from what Michael Savage has long called the newest mental disorder – extreme liberalism.
Take for example, their fight against oil refineries. Long held as a triumph of a marriage of environmental sensitivity and beautiful engineering, of chemical process and cleanliness, refineries were nevertheless abhorred by Leftists as a symbol of American exceptionalism wrapped in some sort of environmental effrontery. So, what did the Left do? They essentially criminalized the construction of new refineries, to everyone’s detriment. The problem was (and is): we still need refineries.
So what did the oil companies do? They moved them to countries more concerned with getting things done, the environment be damned. I think of the refineries and other production facilities I saw in third world countries – massive, beautiful installations that SHOULD have been built in my own country – and the profligate waste and messiness they exhibited. Oil leaking everywhere and seeping into the ground. Un-scrubbed emissions spewing into the air. All the Left succeeded in doing was exporting the worst of the process, to the detriment of Mother Earth. We should have kept them here where they are infinitely cleaner.
The same could be said about anything else they hate: those things merely get exported, and thereby are out of our reach of oversight and regulation. Extreme Liberalism is indeed a mental disorder.
My comments on Ms. McArdle’s article appear as inset comments below:
JUNE 24, 2016 1:20 PM EDT
‘Citizens of the World’? Nice Thought, But …
By Megan McArdle, Bloomberg.
I didn’t think it would actually happen.
Sitting in an airport with middle-class Britons last week, I heard far more support for leaving the European Union than for staying in. But heading into Thursday’s voting, I couldn’t quite believe it.
I didn’t think it would happen simply because things like this usually don’t. The status quo is a powerful totem. People don’t like jumping off into the unknown. As polls moved toward Remain in the waning days of the campaign, I assumed that we were seeing the usual pattern: People flirt with the new, dangerous outsider, then come home and marry the familiar boy next door.
Funny: my thought here was of the Iranian imports we accepted into America in the wake of the Shah’s downfall in the 1980s. How many American boys were shunted aside by American girls who were enamored of the new and sexy Iranian hunks? I had personal experience with this. A girlfriend from long ago dumped me and went for an Iranian man, and then paid the price not a year later when he exhibited all that he’d been trained to do: He was essentially a misogynist who wanted “his woman” behind him and two steps to the right at all times. American boys had been recently trained in the ways of equality but had always been trained in the notion of respect and love. The familiar boy next door turned out to be OK and she came flooding back but only after she’d had a child with the fucker and would forever then pay that price.
It turned out my anecdata from the airport did better than the polls. And way, way better than the betting markets, which as late as 7 p.m. in the Eastern U.S. gave “Remain” a 96 percent chance of winning. Betting markets failed worse than polls, worse than a casual survey in an airport. They failed, because as the blogger Epicurean Dealmaker pointed out on Twitter, “Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites,” which makes them “Structurally less able to predict populist movements.”
Anecdata – now, there’s an interesting word and one I had never seen before. It is simply the plural of the word anecdote! I love it.
The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night (following the win of the Brexit supporters in England). Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down. But perhaps, like the fellow I once saw lose a packet by betting on 17 for 20 straight turns of the roulette wheel, they reasoned that the recent loss actually makes a subsequent victory more likely, since the number has to come up sometime.
The elites in America are no less snobby. Us normal folk are not to be trusted with self-government, what with our guns and bibles and such.
Or perhaps they were just unable to grasp what I noted in a column last week: that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment — a nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a new one.
And oh how the leftists swoon over Billary but announce that, should Trump win, they will relocate. Honest to God, where did they learn such thoughts?
In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.
Megan, I could not agree more. Thin skin is only the beginning of their reaction.
Well, here’s one journalist (me, Megan) who is not having a meltdown. I think Brexit will be somewhat costly — if you want to understand just how complicated the separation will be, take a gander at the primer that the law firm Dechert put up for its clients — but it’s not going to destroy the country or start a war, so if Britain wants out, then … bon voyage. I can certainly understand why my British friends who supported Remain are upset, and why people in other countries who are actually going to experience long-term effects from this decision are unhappy—if I were a Pole, I’d be worried as heck. But I don’t take it personally.
A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia. You could also, I’d argue, see this sentiment in the reaction of global markets, which was grossly out of proportion to the actual economic damage that is likely to be done by Brexit. I mean, yes, the British pound took a pounding, and no surprise. But why did this so roil markets for the Mexican peso? Did traders fear that the impact on the global marmite supply was going to unsettle economies everywhere?
Well, no. This was a reflection of sudden uncertainty, not a prediction about the global economic future.
But the sheer extent of the carnage made me wonder if one of the uncertainties traders were newly contemplating was when the morlocks are going to be coming for us outward-looking professional types with pitchforks.
The answer to these uncertainties, I submit, is not to simply keep doing what we’re doing. There’s a lot of appeal to the internationalist idea that building superstates will tamp down on war. But there’s a reason that the 19th century architects of superstates (now known simply as “states”) spent so much time and effort nurturing national identity in the breasts of their populace. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.”
Megan, the problem of course is that “people like me” no longer exist, at least not in numbers to counter the extremes of Extreme Liberalism. Sheeple are the direct result of 50 years of social engineering by the super-statists, with most of the people like me coming to believe that there must be something better than the racist, jingoist America we thought we lived in. Turns out, however, that there isn’t. America was and is the last best hope.
The EU never did this work. When asked “Where are you from?” almost no one would answer “Europe,” because after 50 years of assiduous labor by the eurocrats, Europe remains a continent, not an identity. As Matthew Yglesias points out, an EU-wide soccer team would be invincible — but who would root for it? These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to 
tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them. Trying to build the state without the nation has led to the mess that is the current EU. And to Thursday’s election results.
Here I am reminded of a wonderful quote: “Love of country is what I do NOT feel when I am wronged, but what I felt when secure in my rights as a citizen. Indeed, I do not consider that I am now attacking a country that is still mine; I am rather trying to recover one that is mine no longer; and the true lover of his country is NOT he who consents to lose it unjustly rather than attack it, but he who longs for it so much that he will go to all lengths to recover it.” – Thucydides, On the History of the Peloponnesian War, Page 279.
Elites missed this because they’re the exception — the one group that has a transnational identity. And in fact the arguments for the EU look a lot like the old arguments for national states: a project that will empower people like us against the scary people who aren’t (like us).
Unhappily for the elites, there is no “Transnationalprofessionalistan” to which they can move. (And who would trim the hedges, make the widgets, and staff the nursing homes if there were?) They have to live in physical places, filled with other people whose loyalties are to a particular place and way of life, not an abstract ideal, or the joys of rootless cosmopolitanism.
In other words, they have to tolerate us normal folk who believe in place and country.
Even simple self-interest suggests that it may be time for the elites in Britain and beyond to sue for peace, rather than letting their newborn transnational identity drive them into a war they can’t win — as happened with so many new states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Try to reforge common identities with the neighbors they have to live with, and look for treaty rules that will let them live in peace.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that transnationalism is any more capable of tempering its own excesses than the nationalism that preceded it.
