The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America's Trump
By Anthony Barnett
If you are British, and especially if you are young and British, your right to move, live, love, work, research and settle in another country of our continent, may be taken away from you by Brexit, should it be implemented.
Contempt for due process, civilised government, honesty and every liberty except wealth rules in the White House.
A profound and multilayered process is under way concerning who has the right to rule, in what ways and how this relates to our neighbours and the world as a whole. It is political, economic, social, cultural, national, global and imaginative.
We live in an age of hedge funds and derivatives, globalism and fundamentalism, carbon emissions and climate change; and a desire for democracy locked in a system managed by the unaccountable.
The ‘globalist’ system is governed by world banks and international funds, yet presents itself as ‘natural’, seeking only to assist ‘the market’.
Brexit and Trump came about in a cataract of deceit, sound bites, evasions and demagogy on all sides.
How is it possible that England, should come to regard freedom of movement as a one-way ‘threat’ of inward invasion.
How can it possibly be that a country that elected Barack Hussein Obama twice choose a misogynist thug.
Something irreversible has happened, which people feel in their bones: it is the end of an era, a truly historic moment: 2016 is a year ‘like 1968’, a year of ‘revolution’.
Something irreversible has happened, which people feel in their bones: it is the end of an era, a truly historic moment: 2016 is a year ‘like 1968’, a year of ‘revolution’.
People do not ‘feel’ their interests are represented because they are not. Trust has not been ‘lost’ by voters – it has been betrayed by their rulers.
The European Union became the most highly organised example of making entire nation states powerless. Smaller governments could be reduced to becoming the prison officers enforcing the rules of imprisonment on their own people, with rules decided elsewhere in the corporate stratosphere.
Brexit and Trump are attempts at a mass breakout from the marketised incarceration of contemporary corporate democracy.