Populist insurgency: Britain vs. EU, Trump vs. Hillary
“Around the world, voices cry out: Power To The People” blared the cover page of the New York Post, spotlighting Britain’s historic vote to split from the European Union, an unprecedented and precisely targeted strike against Europe’s political and economic elite.
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, politics and economics have mostly moved in one direction, with the elites on both sides on the Atlantic favoring policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, the introduction of European currency and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization,” write Nelson Schwartz and Patricia Cohen, economics reporters for The New York Times.
On the issue of “Britain’s subservience to the EU,” George Will explained the level of diminished British sovereignty in reporting that the “privileged bureaucrats” in Brussels had control of “60 to 70 percent of the British government’s actions.”
Not unlike Hillary Clinton’s promotion of the concept that it takes a village to raise a child, the globalists’ paradigm says it takes a plethora of international planning councils to raise the world’s behavior through restrictions on individual and national sovereignty and the enactment of an array of global rules, commands and constraints on national budgets, public debt, income distribution, economic growth, fiscal equity, [RR1] energy, climate, borders, and the customs and values of previously self-governing nations.
“The world is also coming full circle because now it’s the Brits who are free,” declared New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. “It took them a while, but they finally had their own Tea Party and their own revolution.”
It took a revolution by British voters to leave the European Union after four decades of rule by the central planners in Brussels “because the leaders of both of Britain’s major political parties united in opposition to change, with the pooh-bahs and grandees trying to scare voters into sticking with the status quo,” explained Goodwin. “Naturally, the establishment media lectured the rubes on what was good for them. Sound familiar, America?”
Donald Trump described the British vote to exit the European Union as a move toward national independence, saying that voters “took their country back.”
There was less celebrating about Britain’s vote among America’s top Democrats. “Stuck on the wrong side of history, President Obama and Hillary Clinton acted as if their dogs died,” said Goodwin.
Portraying themselves not so long ago as top-notch agents of political change, as instruments skilled and bright enough to fundamentally transform America, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have now become more conventional than groundbreaking, turning out to be timeworn guardians and expanders of political correctness, automatic advocates of the old machine politics of group identity and group entitlements, as well as promoters of more globalization and ever-expanding programs of transnational regulations, mandates and controls.
A perceptive comment on populism made some years ago by left-wing journalist and author Alexander Cockburn might provide some troubling news for Hillary Clinton in evaluating the outcome of the current presidential race in America: “No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity.”