One year from now the leaders of the Free World could well be two men born in New York with weird orange hair, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and American President Donald Trump. You don’t think so, well look at the Brexit results and what you see is the dance of The Boris and The Donald.
Brexit is shorthand for the British leaving the European Union. Not many Americans paid attention to the vote last Thursday on whether to stay in the European Union, but we woke up to its importance when US stock market lost 600 points after Britain voted for Brexit.
This was a vote about class; working folks who have been left behind by globalization voting against a bunch of far off bureaucrats who are more concerned about climate change in 50 years than jobs for struggling blokes today. The immediate response of the chattering classes in the United States, as exemplified by our mainstream media, was that this was just xenophobia and ignorance. Well, in fact, the Brexit vote shows why Hillary Clinton could well lose the presidential election because, like the establishment in Britain, her handlers are in denial about how mad people are about their own economic conditions.
What was the Brexit story? Great Britain joined the European Union over 40 years ago when it was largely the western European countries. But being in the EU mean they had to accept immigrants from all over Europe, and this now includes immigrants from Eastern Europe – Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria – and that has not been popular.
So the immigration issue in Britain is white Europeans who are seen as taking jobs away from native Brits. It is quite different from here. There are no illegal aliens in Britain, in fact it is impossible. Non whites from the Commonwealth have a right to travel to Britain, which explains the large population of Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and Africans from former colonies. Brexit did not affect them at all. The problem is that any resident of the 27 other EU countries has a legal right to come into Britain; the country could not control its own borders.
So American commentators who blamed Brexit simply on xenophobia and hate got it wrong. “Almost 90 percent of the population is white in the UK, which explains the widespread fear about immigrants,” wrote a Sacramento Bee editorial. In fact, it is white immigrants not Asians or Africans that the Brexit vote was about; the Poles and other Eastern Europeans who can move to Britain at will and can almost immediately go on welfare.
Every part of England except London voted for Brexit, from the heavily Labour industrial north to the posh and wealthy southern counties. Only one area voted to stay in: London. What’s the difference, London’s economy is based on financial services in a global economy; the rest of England is not.
That was the difference; the divide was over globalization; not xenophobia or race. People who feel left behind in a global economy, which is much of England, voted to rid themselves of the fuddy duddy socialist bureaucracy in Brussels that runs the EU.
Take for instance London and Birmingham. The Inner London boroughs are the wealthiest places in Europe, creating wealth, as in coastal America, through finance and information age industries. Wandsworth, an Inner London borough, is heavily Conservative and wealthy; it voted 75 percent to remain in the EU.
Birmingham is England’s second largest city, in the Midlands, the heartland of the Labour Party, yet it voted narrowly for Leave. London and Birmingham are close demographically, both being about 60 percent white with large South Asian and African populations. But Birmingham is the old industrial England that globalization is leaving behind. The Midlands, where Birmingham is, voted 59% for Leave, the highest Leave vote anywhere in the country.
Not understanding the resentments in England over having much of their economy run from foreign countries, American analysts have missed the lesson of Brexit. Hillary Clinton is running exactly the campaign that the “Remain” side ran; predicting horrible things if the country left, trying to win by scaring people. Amazingly, Clinton has adopted as the new theme of her campaign the vacuous phrase “Stronger Together,” which was the theme of the losing Remain campaign in Britain.
Clinton’s strength, and the Democratic Party’s strength, is in coastal America, the parts of America that are like wealthy London. But the resentments over being left behind in “flyover” America are remarkably the same as in the vast areas of England that voted out with a shout.
Mitt Romney won 206 Electoral Votes in 2012. If Donald Trump can win Romney’s states and five “Rust Belt” states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, he will be the next president.
These states have a demography and economy remarkably like the north of England. If the Democrats do not respond to the very real angst of these people who feel left behind, they will deserve to lose and they will lose. Just yelling racism and xenophobia, as liberals seem wont to do since last Thursday, won’t do.
To use a very American phrase: that dog just won’t hunt in this election year.