American Brexit

Like much of the planet, I have been struggling to wrap my mind around what transpired on November 8. In the dramatic finale to a profoundly dramatic and wild 2016 campaign, Donald Trump shocked everyone with a resounding Electoral College victory. A long period of recrimination has just begun.

I've devoted a lot of space in this blog to my anxieties about the 2016 campaign. In the days, weeks, months and (probably) years ahead, I'll be devoting a lot of time to more fully understanding the political earthquake that's just rocked the United States. Moreover, the important business of sorting through the implications has begun in earnest.

Yet, as I watched the returns well into Wednesday morning, the one recurring thought I had was that we were watching an American version of last summer's stunning referendum on British membership in the European Union (my post on that, here). In my mind, Tuesday's American Brexit is a blow to postwar liberalism equivalent to a warship being fatally torpedoed below the waterline. In some quarters, all of this will be celebrated as an appropriate
shake-up of the status quo. Uncertainty and chaos be damned, a changing of the guard was long over-due.

Perhaps. Fortunately liberalism is not a warship, but a set of ideas whose foundations and loudest purveyors were in need of a shake-up (something I've written about here). Buckle up, the shake-up has begun. The Economist, long a bastion of liberalism, made much the same argument in its reaction to Trump's election. I strongly recommend you read the whole piece (linked here). However, the last paragraph sums up our modern world perfectly. I've copied it below:

The election of Mr Trump is a rebuff to all liberals, including this newspaper. The open markets and classically liberal democracy that we defend, and which had seemed to be affirmed in 1989, have been rejected by the electorate first in Britain and now in America. France, Italy and other European countries may well follow. It is clear that popular support for the Western order depended more on rapid growth and the galvanising effect of the Soviet threat than on intellectual conviction. Recently Western democracies have done too little to spread the benefits of prosperity. Politicians and pundits took the acquiescence of the disillusioned for granted. As Mr Trump prepares to enter the White House, the long, hard job of winning the argument for liberal internationalism begins anew.

The Economist, Print Edition, November 12, 2016.