In February of this year, I predicted that there would be no Brexit by the 29 March deadline. I was right. The next magic day was 31 October, which has proven equally uneventful. Now it’s time to think about how all this fits into the long arc of the rise and fall of British democracy.
Way back
on February 27 of this year, less than a week after I started blogging at
Twilight Patriot, I predicted that there would be no Brexit. This went against the
conventional thinking on the matter: the British people had voted to leave the European
Union, the May government had spent nearly two years negotiating the terms of departure,
and the promise was that Britain would be out by 29 March.
In the
three-years-and-change since the June 2016 referendum, the mainstream media and
the alt-media have both put out a copious stream of thinkpieces expressing a
dizzying array of opinions about the meaning and significance of Brexit. While
these writers can’t agree on whether the outcome of the election was good or bad,
they generally at least see it as something important, a sign of the ongoing
populist revolt against the technocratic global elite.
Needless
to say, my belief that the whole thing would end up proving to be no big deal didn’t
get a lot of traction. But when Brexit day came and went, and came and went
again, and is now coming and going the third time, I think that events have
borne me out. Granted, the British government is, for the moment, maintaining
the pretence that Brexit will happen – right now, the date is 31 January – but
when Boris Johnson’s protestations that he would rather be “dead in a ditch”
than delay Brexit past today (it now being 31 October) didn’t pan out, I don’t
think it’s wise to assume that the future will be any different than the past.
In my
post in February, I claimed that elections, across most of the western world,
now have very little impact on public policy. This is actually even more true
in the United States than it is in Britain. Just consider how useless all those
referenda against same sex marriage turned out to be, or the fact that, shortly
after their big win in the 2014 midterms, Republicans were treated to the
legalization of several million illegal aliens in the DACA program, an action
which President Trump, after riding into power on an outraged electorate, has
been forbidden by the courts from reversing.
The
reason that the elites get to ignore elections these days is that they can do
so without facing civil unrest. If, in 1815, Federal Marshals had shown up in a
small town in Kentucky in order to arrest the county clerk for refusing to
marry same-sex couples, the Marshals would have gotten tarred and feathered, in
an optimistic scenario. If, in 1816, Britain had voted to leave an
international organization, and that organization’s officers hadn’t responded
by promptly vacating their British posts, the populace would have responded by
rioting and burning their offices.
And if my
defence of mob violence as a necessary support for democracy seems too crass, I
invite you to consider where political power, in general, comes from. Our word ‘political,’
after all, shares a root with ‘police,’ and people obey the police because they
know that if they don’t, they could get arrested, beaten, or shot. They obey
mayors, governors, and judges because those officials control the police. And state
and local governments, with their mayors, governors, judges, and policemen in
tow, obey the central government because the standing army is even more
powerful than they are.
In short,
we have the rulers we have because those rulers are willing, and able, to
respond to disobedience with violence. Violence doesn’t have to happen often –
in the United States, for instance, the federal government hasn’t had to wage
war against noncompliant states since the 1860s, and it hasn’t even had to
threaten them with soldiers since the 1960s. Still, the memory of violence is
there, and the obedience follows.
In a
democracy, revolutionary violence has to be a possibility if the dictates of
the common people are spurned – otherwise, the people don’t rule, and the
regime isn’t a democracy. When election results are overturned or ignored by
the intelligentsia, civil unrest ought to follow. Otherwise, the whole idea of ‘power
to the people’ is a sham.
The whole
history of British democracy is a testament of this. All the rights that the
common Englishman has gained since that day in 1215 when King John signed the
Magna Carta on the meadow of Runnymede are rights that were at first given grudgingly,
when the King or the nobles realized that the alternative was another uprising.
Throughout the centuries, as countless Englishmen bore arms in defence of their
liberties, a consensus emerged about what the people's rights were – or in other words, what lines the King couldn’t cross without having another insurrection on
his hands.
The
American War of Independence was an offshoot of all this. Among the most sacred
of the traditional rights of Englishmen was the right not to be taxed without
the consent of an elected body in which they were represented. For the first
century or so of the English settlement of America, colonial governors, who
represented the King, shared power with local elected legislatures, whose
consent was needed to impose taxes. Americans were generally content with this
arrangement, King and all, but when the distant Parliament in London decided
that it could make laws for both the mother country and the colonies, the
desires of the local representative houses being irrelevant, war ensued.
Nowadays
it seems like this arc is coming to an end. Unlike their ancestors who fought
war after war to preserve their rights of self-government, the people of modern
Britain have shown that their electoral preferences have no teeth. The people being thus
unwilling to hold onto political power, the right of rulership has passed on to
someone else – not, of course, back to Her Majesty the Queen, but to an
assortment of ministers, judges, and unscrupulous MPs who don’t feel bound to
carry out the agenda their constituents voted for.
Some
Brexiteers still hold out hope that the next parliamentary election, scheduled
for December, will turn out a government committed enough to strike a deal before
the new deadline. But they shouldn’t hold their breath; none of the previous
elections did that. In any case, the vote back in June of 2016 was close; “Leave”
only won by 52% to 48%. Eventually, the Tories will become disillusioned and their
turnout will suffer, Labour will win a majority in one of these snap elections,
and the whole thing will end up dead and buried, alongside the larger project
of British democracy.
American
democracy, on the other hand, is already a nonentity, having seldom reared its
head since the Warren Court overthrew what was left of the constitution in the
1960s. Congress is now impotent, most policy is dictated by lobbyists, and on
those rare occasions when the people get around to making their voice heard
anyway – like they did in the same-sex marriage referenda – no charade of
compliance is necessary on the part of the elites. Justice Kennedy delivered
his ruling, the media celebrated, and the people who had voted on the winning
side of the election were denounced as bigots six ways from Sunday.
Now, some
of my readers are probably doctrinaire conservatives who, though agreeing with
much of what I say, are bothered by my characterization of the government under
which we once lived as democratic. “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” they
say, seemingly oblivious to the fact that human language only has the meaning that
its users agree upon, and that for the vast majority of the people who have used
these two words throughout the last few centuries, they were synonyms.
And this
is as it should be, because “Democracy” and “Republic” started out as Greek and
Latin words that meant the same thing. That is why, for example, the Hellenic
Republic (the country which westerners, going back to Roman times, have called ‘Greece’)
is called in its own tongue Helleniké Demokratía.
The
question of why so many conservative intellectuals make so much hay out of this
imaginary distinction – a distinction which, I should add, ought to have little
relevance to people living under an oligarchy – is something that I plan to
address next week..
