Tags
Anti-establishment, Brexit, Bureaucracy, Donald Trump, European Union, George Will, Herman Cain, private sector
Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills
“Every successful analysis begins with a unified theory.”
Some Americans credit Donald Trump for the success of Brexit, while others are saying Trump owes Brexit for bumping his campaign toward the presidency.
Actually, both are true to a point, but in a reciprocating way. But the key to understanding that symbiosis is not found in single issues, such as immigration, as some surmise, but in the darkening mood of the industrialized world which has been simmering on a hot stove since the end of the Cold War. Today “globalism”, which only a week ago was acknowledged to be a good thing, when spoken of in the most general of terms, as rolled off the virtuous tongues of world leaders such as Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, has suddenly been shred of its noble raiment and wrapped in a darker aspect; as nothing more than a coterie of corporatists and statists. “Bleeding fascists.” Big Business allied with Big Government had just gotten too damned big. Or so sayeth 54% of the citizens of the United Kingdom.
I doubt Donald Trump foresaw this, or the role he might have played in it. He’s no Wat Tyler. I doubt he even knows who Wat Tyler was. Still, he probably, quite by accident, captured this mood like a firefly, lighting up half the world. A herald of things to come.
About that zeitgeist then, it is aimed at something more elemental than Islamic immigration, or racism and bigotry, as the Left have always called it, and Fleet Street mercantilists and Wall Street crony-capitalists have chimed in to call it lately.
It is aimed, rather, at that underlying, more ancient cancer shared mutually in both Europe and America. Bureaucratism.
Joke: A lawyer with a frog on his head walks into a doctor’s office. The doctor looks up, and the frog says, “Hey, doc, can you get this carbuncle off my behind?” (That’s the cleaned-up version.)
For years, much longer than Donald Trump has been involved in politics, Europe, one nation at a time, has been simmering on the stewpot of over-bearing absentee bureaucracy…with the emphasis of the “over-bearing” and “absentee” inasmuch as one the greatest freedoms a peoples can possess is to be able to decide when enough is enough by saying just how much bad government they are willing to put up with. Much of modern history since the formal formation of the European Union in 1993 has been defined on just where their various breaking points are. When Bulgaria applied for provisional membership after the Kosovo War I warned my government friends there that they would be swapping economic benefits for a few in exchange for burdensome regulation on the many by a faceless, nameless bureaucracy in Brussels. This has been known, and likely a regret, among the majority of the newer EU members for at least a decade[…]