Sunday, June 26, 2016

Elitism in Democratic Drag: Why liberals opposed BREXIT

I was out of town when the British thumbed their noses at the EU and much of their own government by voting to leave the European Union. I walked back to my hotel room from the convention I was at and turned on CNN, where commentator after commentator declared that BREXIT was the end of British civilization as we know it, and that, in general the sky was falling and we're all going to die.

The curious thing about all the hand-ringing is that it was accompanied by virtually no explanation as to why, exactly, BREXIT was bad for Britain or anyone else. I watched for a full two hours and didn't hear a single reason why this was such a disaster, other than that it was upsetting to liberals. There may very well be a downside, but you wouldn't have been able to actually detect it in any of the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from the media.

In fact, for some of us, large numbers of upset liberals is itself a good sign. 

Why did liberals oppose BREXIT? This question is of course related to the question of why liberals like the EU so much in the first place. 

The reason liberals opposed BREXIT (and like the EU) is that liberals are elitist. Despite all the rhetoric about democracy and egalitarianism, liberals are fundamentally and philosophically opposed to both.

What inclusion in the EU means for the common person is that he will have important decisions made for him by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, the capital of the EU. 

It is a maxim of organizational political dynamics that the bigger the bureaucracy, the more liberal is its leadership. Exhibits A and B: the EU, the UN. Elite bureaucracies are always more liberal than the people.

In addition, having a governing system in which decisions are made by anonymous people in faraway places means never having to say you're sorry. And to be a liberal leader in a member country puts you in the position, when you are criticized for some absurd liberal policy imposed on you by the technocratic elites in Belgium's capital city, to be able to simply shrug your shoulders and say, "I'm sorry, but we have no choice but to comply because we're EU members."

Most liberal policies would never see the light of day if liberals had to depend upon the ordinary processes of an even vaguely democratic government. The only way most of them can ever succeed in being implemented is if they are forced on the public by institutions that are unaccountable to the people.

This is how here in the United States we got abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage, and now transgender bathrooms. Only rarely are these kinds of policies the result of the democratic process. They are almost exclusively the product of some unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic or judicial elite. And that's how we get trade deals that enrich trans-national corporations and line the pockets of people like Hillary Clinton while putting middle class Americans out of work.

Like all elite institutions, the EU is peopled by "progressives," the Anointed Ones, who know better than the rest of us how we should live our lives. 

And that's the way liberals want to keep it. That's why they are in favor of the Supreme Court in the United States being able to rewrite the U. S. Constitution on a whim without going through the constitutionally appointed process of amending it. It's why they want the bureaucracy in Washington to be able to issue proclamations that have no grounding in any law passed by Congress. It's why they like the UN.


And it's why they opposed BREXIT. 

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