“As big as Agincourt,” said one pro-Brexit friend of mine, a highly intellectual former soldier of an admittedly enthusiastic type. “Well, maybe make that Suez,” he said after a pause, “but in any case, the biggest political event here of my lifetime.” Arriving in London immediately after the vote that will carry Britain out of the European Union I was inclined to agree.
The pros and cons of Brexit are complicated; reasonable people could and did disagree. But what was most interesting was the reaction to a vote outcome unpredicted by the pollsters or, just as important these days, the betting parlors. In London, and throughout most of Britain’s upper-middle class world, the quality press, and the political establishment—the Great and the Good, in short—the result was not disappointment but curious combination of despair, hysteria, and quiet elation.
Much of the outcry against Brexit was not merely despondent, but, as my Twitter feed revealed, unqualified in its belief that the vote was a catastrophe. Equally unambiguous was the contempt expressed for those on the other side. The professors, business people, and journalists making remarks about the “lizard brain of the British people” had no visible inclination to do what some American conservatives appalled by the rise of Trump have realized they need to do, namely, figure out why a majority of their countrymen went for a choice they consider dangerously crazy.
What also appeared was a manifestation of a nasty class-based bigotry, as acid and ugly as anything an 18th-century aristocrat might have expressed for an uppity cobbler who presumed to have a political opinion. It was manifested most clearly, in London at any rate, by the gilded young who immediately began snarling at the old and the working class who voted for Brexit, and talking—emptily, most likely—about leaving London for elsewhere.
The larger phenomenon here, however, is a crisis not of ignorant masses, but of elites who have failed. All societies, except perhaps the Greek city-states of antiquity, are led by elites or, as the great sociologist Digby Baltzell described them, establishments. As long as they provide their societies with some consequential benefit (prosperity, success in war, or political leadership), can absorb talented non-elite members, and display virtues that the rest of society values (public service, self-sacrifice, or military courage) they deserve to hang on and do.
The elites of London, like those of this country and large parts of the Western world, appear in many ways to have failed those tests. The crash of 2008 crystallized a view of the financial class in particular as reckless, self-dealing manipulators. As Joel Kotkin among others has pointed out, by virtue of how our education systems have evolved, elite youth increasingly marry one another, and the prosperous can (and do) give their children every leg up—which poorer parents cannot hope to match. Meanwhile, the political and intellectual elites deserve, and receive, very little credit for patriotism or courage, because they do not exhibit much. As manifested on campuses in Great Britain as here, they increasingly show themselves intolerant of dissenting opinions, and inclined to bully because they have forgotten (or never learned) how to argue.
The failure of courage, Solzhenitsyn said at a particularly dark point in the Cold War, was in danger of becoming a distinguishing feature of the West. The young people who talked petulantly of abandoning their country because of a vote they did not like were bright graduates of the best universities in the English-speaking world—and severely deficient in pluck. They had no notion of that patriotism which says that when your country is in trouble, you are supposed to fight it out, not begin checking to see if Morgan Stanley is hiring in Madrid. They are not fit to be trusted with political power.
And in the very intemperateness of their reaction lies one of the best reasons to think that Brexit is, with all its hazards, a good thing. The London of today was sliding into becoming a bigger, brighter, and more lively Brussels—so international that it had no discernible identity; so cosmopolitan in its self-understanding that it had no pride in its own history and unique character; so unwilling to accept the burdens of self-government that it preferred the administration of well-meaning but unaccountable bureaucrats to the crash and bang of democracy in action. The poison of Brussels-style Euro-politics had clearly infected those Londoners whose first impulse was to do what European politicians have done for decades: compel the lower classes who have voted the wrong way to vote again until they do the thing their betters thought they ought to have done in the first place.
At the end of the day, however, and despite the views expressed by the leaders of all the major political parties, the flagship newspapers, and most of the intellectual class, Brexit won. Bloody-mindedness probably helped. President Obama’s meddling in British politics by arguing for “remain” inadvertently assisted the campaign for “leave.” There were, it turned out, politicians and intellectuals ready to make the case for Brexit. Today, millions of Brits rightly think that they are reclaiming independence and sovereignty that had been leaching away to an amorphous and corrupt European federation cracking under the strain of multiple crises.
And although it may be rocky, it will probably work, despite the scaremongering and the doomsaying. European politicians have threatened, in effect, to punish Britain for leaving by withholding the free market if Britain does not accept all of the European Union’s rules—but their own record of yielding to pressure, ignoring their own commitments, and going back on their word suggests that in the end, they will bend. Great Britain has a larger and healthier economy than France. It cannot be coerced the way Norway was into accepting all of the European Union’s rules. U.S. politicians may even (and should) quietly remind Europe’s leaders that our sympathies are with the country whose language, literature, and legal system shaped our own, and whose armed forces are one of our most valued partners.
The Scottish nationalists, who are no longer a majority in the Scottish Parliament, may try to secede, but if they do they will have to lead Scotland into a European Union in worsening turmoil, some of whose members bitterly oppose secessionist nationalisms like theirs (e.g. Spain fearful of the Catalan independence movement), and which will not have the money to replace the billions of pounds in English subsidies that keep the Scottish welfare state afloat. As for the banks, some will no doubt reallocate staff elsewhere in Europe, but London was an epic financial center before the European Union existed, and will remain so because of the power of British rule of law, the attractiveness of the city, its physical location, and the ubiquity of English as the international language.
Brexit, like the rise of Trump, can be interpreted as a manifestation of the failure of elites, but it is a far healthier phenomenon. The Brits of 2016 are not the Brits of 1940, but if Britain could handle Philip II of Spain and Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, it can probably cope with the temper tantrums of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. Meanwhile, Brussels is locked into a political system that seems doomed to stasis. Brexit will have second- and third-order effects in a Europe that is economically stagnant, incapable of coping with a vast migration crisis, unable to defend itself against a much-poorer Russia to its East, and rattled by Islamist terrorists from the forgotten neighborhoods. The Brits have merely acted on sentiments shared by many Europeans; the revolt of the latter may be a lot nastier than the more orderly decision of the former.
Brexit was a courageous thing to do. If it succeeds it may mark a change not only in the structure of Europe, but in the character of our societies and those who lead them. If that is so, the British will once again, as so often in the past, set a course for others to follow, and we should cheer them on.