You Never Know

 
If you ever played poker, you know deception is necessary. It's called bluffing.

The contempt and arrogance of Brussels bureaucrats showed up big time in the Brexit saga. They didn't miscalculate the British people. That's too deceptive, too dishonest a term.You can't miscalculate something you don't recognize or believe exists. Their views from the beginning were utter contempt and disdain for common people.

In a WSJ Weekend piece, Fraser Nelson, the editor of Spectator and Daily Telegraph columnist, writes in his "A Very British Revolution," The world is looking at Britain and asking: What on Earth just happened? Those who run Britain are asking the same question.

Never has there been a greater coalition of the establishment than that assembled by Prime Minister David Cameron for his referendum campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union. There was almost every Westminster party leader, most of their troops and almost every trade union and employers’ federation. There were retired spy chiefs, historians, football clubs, national treasures likeStephen Hawking and divinities like Keira Knightley. And some global glamour too: President Barack Obama flew to London to do his bit, and Goldman Sachs opened its checkbook.

And none of it worked. The opinion polls barely moved over the course of the campaign, and 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU. That slender majority was probably the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.

Mr. Cameron announced that he would resign because he felt the country has taken a new direction—one that he disagrees with. If everyone else did the same, the House of Commons would be almost empty. Britain’s exit from the EU, or Brexit, was backed by barely a quarter of his government members and by not even a tenth of Labour politicians. It was a very British revolution. 

But the truth is it goes way beyond the British establishment. There are others lining up now, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, maybe even France. In America it could be called a Texit. Mr. Nelson goes on to try to make a point--incorrectly and completely misunderstood in our view--others are trying to make summarized in these two paragraphs of his.

Donald Trump's arrival in Scotland on Friday to visit one of his golf courses was precisely the metaphor that the Brexiteers didn’t want. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee cheerily declared that the British had just “taken back their country” in the same way that he’s inviting Americans to do—underscoring one of the biggest misconceptions about the EU referendum campaign. Britain isn’t having a Trump moment, turning in on itself in a fit of protectionist and nativist pique. Rather, the vote for Brexit was about liberty and free trade—and about trying to manage globalization better than the EU has been doing from Brussels.

The Brexit campaign started as a cry for liberty, perhaps articulated most clearly by Michael Gove, the British justice secretary (and, on this issue, the most prominent dissenter in Mr. Cameron’s cabinet). Mr. Gove offered practical examples of the problems of EU membership. As a minister, he said, he deals constantly with edicts and regulations framed at the European level—rules that he doesn’t want and can’t change. These were rules that no one in Britain asked for, rules promulgated by officials whose names Brits don’t know, people whom they never elected and cannot remove from office. Yet they become the law of the land. Much of what we think of as British democracy, Mr. Gove argued, is now no such thing.

What Mr. Nelson seems to miss just as in the UK, there are rules in the U.S."promulgated by" officials whose names Americans don't know, "people they never elected and cannot be removed from office. Yet they become the law of the land." We will cite just too easy examples, both of which profoundly effect the lives of many, many people, not just in the now but more importantly the future, one local and one national: the Federal Reserve Board of the United States and any regional coastal control board.

Instead of grumbling about the things we can’t change, Mr. Gove said, it was time to follow “the Americans who declared their independence and never looked back” and “become an exemplar of what an inclusive, open and innovative democracy can achieve.” Many of the Brexiteers think that Britain voted this week to follow a template set in 1776 on the other side of the Atlantic.

Mr. Gove was mocked for such analogies. Surely, some in the Remain camp argued, the people who were voting for Leave—the pensioners in the seaside towns, the plumbers and chip-shop owners—weren’t wondering how they could reboot the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment for the 21st century. Perhaps not, but the sentiment holds: Liberty and democracy matter. As a recent editorial in Der Spiegel put it, Brits “have an inner independence that we Germans lack, in addition to myriad anti-authoritarian, defiant tendencies.”

The America that your praise, Mr. Nelson, was founded on that "inner dependence...in addition to  myriad anti-authoritarian, defiant tendencies," characteristics much adopted at least in part from it's UK roots.

You then, Mr. Nelson, in all your glibness spread a little of your own deception, citing if only the Germans would have a cut a better deal for the UK to control its own immigration problem things might have turned out different.  "The EU," you write, "took a gamble: that the Brits were bluffing and would never vote to leave."A large segment of Americans, hardly what they've been unjustly labeled, "haters" or "xenophobes" by MSM and others, and evidently you, want the same thing, a little more say in their immigration problem and in their lives. We seem to recall Angela Merkel facing a similar outcry in Germany.

Trump traction has much more to do with the issues that you cite pushed Brexit into the leave win column that people like you are willing to understand or admit.  One wonders who the real xenophobes are? The Trump movement is hardly a turning in, to use your condescending view, "a fit of protectionist and nativist pique." It's a turning away from smothering centralized control, a breath of liberty, sovereignty and freedom your beloved Brits just demonstrated they so desire and so deserve, sir. You conclude, suggesting: You never know: the principles of democracy,sovereignty and freedom might just catch on.

You never know:  And people like you, sir, might get it some day; that's what others also want.