Historically it is the role of leaders to foresee, understand and explain great changes afoot in the world.
Yet regarding Britain’s exit from the European Union, Western leaders have spectacularly failed to do any of these things.
Anybody who was anybody in politics, business, finance, academia, punditry, polling, and even bookmakers resolutely declared that Brexit shouldn’t happen and wouldn’t happen. Within living memory, never have so many been so wrong about so much.
So, we are left to wonder why the electorate of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated democracy delivered such a shocking rebuke to their establishment.
Until last month, the forward progress of the EU was thought to be irresistible and irreversible. Today there is a dawning awareness that it is a noble idea born in the rubble of a shattered post-war Europe that has gone badly awry.
Now in the great tradition of Monday-morning quarterbacking, the seismic event of Brexit has opened many people’s eyes to realities that should have been obvious from the outset — i.e., that the current economic stagnation and political disorders of the EU are directly traceable to the monumental blunder of transforming a very successful economic collaboration (the European economic community or “common market”) into a very unsuccessful political union.
The responses of the establishment to Brexit have been unseemly, running the gamut from petulance, to threats, and plaintive demands for a re-vote. We hear confident assertions that it is the U.K., not the EU that is in big trouble. We are told that the militant Protestant majority of Northern Ireland will be demanding to become a minority by joining up with the poorer and heavily Catholic Irish Republic, and that the Scots who resoundingly rejected leaving Great Britain just two years ago will now happily forgo the large financial subsidies they receive from the more affluent English, and jump into the increasingly leaky boat of a morbid EU economy.
The realities on the ground are very different. The next secession referendums won’t be in Northern Ireland or Scotland, but much more likely in Holland or France, where the growing legions of Euro-skeptics who received a tremendous boost from the Brexit vote are now demanding to know why if the British people can vote why can’t they.
The world was told that if tiny and impoverished Greece were allowed to tumble out of the E.U. the entire “European Project” would be endangered. The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and others declared that almost any price must be paid to prevent this calamity.
A striking aspect of the Brexit vote is that 35 percent to 40 percent of working-class Labour Party members defied their own leaders and joined their middle-class counterparts in choosing “Leave.” A thoughtful explanation was offered by Prime Minister David Cameron’s justice secretary, Michael Gove, who vigorously supported Brexit: “They were not racists or xenophobes, but they clearly saw that the EU was undermining not just their economic viability but their very way of life. By voting Leave they felt they could reclaim their own country.”
Gove also stressed that 60 percent of the laws passed in Britain were simply mandatory affirmations of regulations “we did not want promulgated by Brussels bureaucrats we did not know, did not elect, and could not turn out of office.” He concluded, “The independence of our Parliamentary Democracy built over centuries was rapidly disappearing before our very eyes.”
The blindness of the affluent elites to the experiences and anxieties of ordinary people reflects a deep-seated economic and political malaise that left unchecked will have dire consequences for the future of the West.
In another tumultuous age when Europe was caught up in the swirling turmoil of the French Revolution, England’s great Prime Minister William Pitt declared, “England can save herself by her exertions and Europe by her example.”
He was right. Now we must hope to again find leaders of similar character, resolve and ability to rise to the challenges our own turbulent age.
William Moloney is a former Colorado education commissioner.
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