So Britain is out.
Woo-hoo! Doesn’t that feel good?
Well, in fact, for some folks it does. In particular, if you’re an unempowered bloke, lacking much personal sense of agency, and you’ve watched your world get whittled down bit by bit over the last several decades, the sense of doing something, anything – the sheer joy of authoring some real wreckage – is tasty. And all the more so because of its rarity. It’s been so long since you got to poke some joker in the eye, who cares who it is or what comes next, eh? Just do it.
Whatever the motivation, this is a milestone. The direct consequences of the British referendum vote are likely to be substantial, if not profound. But it is the indirect consequences, and the symbolic import, that are most significant. For this is, make no mistake, the first but likely not the last major manifestation of a long-brewing discontent that threatens nothing less than the unraveling of a post-war world order of (mostly) peace and prosperity.
Worse, the looming possible catastrophe has been eminently avoidable. But certain actors had a strong interest in getting what they wanted, and damn the(se) costs. In the end, this is a story of what greed buys. And all too often, what greed buys is death and destruction.
The phenomenon we’re talking about – let’s call it Trumpism, for lack of a better term – is sweeping the Western world. All across Europe and North America and beyond there has been an explosion of flailing political rage and stupidity in recent years. Whether it takes the form of the avowed Nazi-sympathizing Golden Dawn in Greece, the less-avowed Nazi-sympathizing National Front in France, slobbering Sarah Palin enthusiasts in America, or agitated Brexit voters in the UK, it is essentially the same concept everywhere, driven by the same factors.
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Given that this is a cup of tea that has been steeping at least since the 1980s, the current boiling point we’re witnessing is in many ways actually less surprising than that it has taken this long to happen.
Some of the factors paving the road to this rash of Neo-Know-Nothingism have been benign if not laudable in their intent. Or, they have been simple products of historical evolution, rolling along with no intentionality, at all. Nobody makes tsunamis or earthquakes (though DARPA has no doubt tried), and nobody has any reason to do so (did I mention DARPA?), but still they happen, and with enormous – dare we say, tectonic – consequences. Similarly, at some point in history somebody invents the printing press, or manufactures gunpowder, or sequences DNA, and the world is rocked, however little global revolution may have been part of the original intent.
In our time, three such tendencies have conspired with especial consequence to unmoor the foundations of the post-war compact in Western societies: technological revolution, globalization, and civil rights movements. The last of these is certainly the more intentional of the lot. The second is partly the consequence of the first (that is to say, it’s a lot easier to globalize when you have the technology of satellites and oil tankers and the Internet with which to do so). But what they share in common is a slow tsunami-like effect on Western societies. And, especially, on certain demographic cohorts within those societies.
There is much to say about the explosion of technological capability in our time, of course. We could fill entire libraries with just a card catalog (for one indicator of the degree of technological change, remember those?) of what has been said and needs to be said on this subject. But, for our purposes in exploring the current political meltdown of the West, what matters most are the largely unmitigated human-level economic byproducts of these changes. One can build a robot to make widgets on an assembly line without any other intention than, say, to innovate, or to make money selling a product to manufacturers, or to increase productivity. It doesn’t matter so much what motivated these technologies, but it does matter that their near-universal effect is the destruction of working and middle class jobs. It can be argued that this ‘creative destruction’ process also produces a raft of new employment opportunities, but even if that is true, the dislocations are still massive, not least because 50 year-old blue collar assembly-line workers are not especially good candidates for being retrained to write computer code or design fiber-optics networks.
While those pressures have been crippling workers for decades, perhaps an even more consequential development has been the advent of globalization. This has meant many things, some of them pretty great. If you like eating Thai food, Skyping with your pal in Kathmandu (for free, no less – remember how expensive international (audio only) phone calls were not so long ago?), or economic development opportunities for Koreans, Taiwanese and other formerly impoverished folk, you can’t in fairness be a total critic of globalization. Its consequences have been absolutely enormous, and by no means are all of them bad. But, again, to understand why Western politics is now going off the rails, it’s crucial to note that some of them are in fact very nasty, especially for certain particularly vulnerable folks. And these mal-effects in the workplace have only exacerbated those of the aforementioned technological change. Indeed, perhaps even more than robots and computers, it is ridiculously cheap labor costs in Mexico – followed by China when Mexico was no longer cheap enough, followed by Vietnam when China was no longer cheap enough – that have massively undercut the position of blue-collar workers in the West, with their (once) decent salaries, health plans, pensions, vacations and sick time. Remarkably, this effect can now increasingly be seen in white collar sectors as well, with First World professional jobs in law or medicine shipping off to India and beyond.
Finally, a series of civil rights movements have transformed the Western world over the last half-century, most visibly in America. It would not be overstating the case to argue that these are among the greatest of achievements in all of human history, right up there with the advent of democracy, the abolition of slavery and the dismantling of colonialism. For the first time ever – in ethos and mostly in legal code, if not always in practice – these societies have embraced the idea that everyone is entitled to the same opportunities, treatment and share of political power, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation. As noted above, this is a landmark development in human history, and it’s especially great news if you happen to be brown, female or gay.
But what if you’re the opposite of all those things? Let’s assume that the distribution of power in a society is a zero-sum game, meaning that for Individual A to obtain X amount of additional power, Individual B must lose precisely the same amount (add the two quantities together and you get zero, hence the term). That’s an arguably incorrect proposition, and there certainly are non-zero-sum games identifiable in the real world. But I think the assumption is largely true in this case. Thus, if we acknowledge that women and people of color and non-straights have more power than they did fifty years ago, we must also account for where that power came from in our zero-sum game. And the answer, of course, is from straight white males. And while we might argue that a more inclusive society benefits all (an example of a non-zero-sum effect), for many folks in this category – especially the less educated and therefore more economically vulnerable ones – the tangible negative effects of yet more competition for scarce resources are far more palpable.
Nor should the psychological add-ons to shrinking wallets be ignored. Let’s be real here. Humans are… well, human. If you were the all-powerful king of the hill yesterday, and today you’re just another schmo, it’s probably gonna sting, even if your income were somehow unchanged. Maybe there will be a few enlightened souls from the former privileged class who never felt comfortable with the evils of inequality even while it benefitted them, and therefore welcome these changes, but these folks will be dwarfed in number by those whose self-esteem has been damaged at least as much as their paycheck. In addition to being poorer, they are going to be angrier and more resentful as well. It may not be pretty, but there’s no sense pretending this isn’t a part of human nature.