Fintan O'Toole, _Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain_

I THOUGHT THIS might blend in well with my having just read Michael Lewis and Ben Fountain on Trump's rise to power, a variation on a theme as it were, based on an assumption of loose correspondence between British politics and our own: they had Thatcher, we had Reagan; we had Clinton, they had Tony Blair; Bernie, Jeremy Corbyn, Trump, Brexit.

If O'Toole is right (and he sure sounds right), the parallel is not so close as all that.

O'Toole (who is Irish) sees England as a Goliath that likes to imagine itself a David: the plucky, slightly cheeky underdog (we happy few, etc.) who prevails over larger, seemingly stronger opponents who wish to impose their will. He notes, for instance, a fashion for alternative-history fiction in which the Nazis conquered England but were bedeviled by resistance groups, and a somewhat perverse preference for the old empire to indulge in fantasies about being national liberation guerrillas.

The master move of the Brexiteers, then, was to cast the EU as Goliath (on various fronts, from immigration to regulating junk food), and that put Brexit over the top. This, despite the shared nativist ressentiment, does not sound all that much like the delusions that put Trump in the White House.

Nor did Trump have, as Brexit did, a core of upper-class, highly literate, rhetorically adept and shamelessly dishonest propagandists--O'Toole frequently invokes the terrifying Melroses of Edward St. Aubyn's novels. All we had was Sean Hannity.

Even so, O'Toole's conclusion hits notes that ring true for the U.S. He writes:

Brexit is part of a much larger phenomenon and it speaks to two much wider truths. One is that is not possible simultaneously to ask people to trust the state and to tell them that the state has no business in any part of their lives in which the market wants free rein. [Please heed, o Clinton wing of the Democratic party.] The other is that the gross inequality produced by neoliberalism is increasingly incompatible with democracy and therefore, in liberal democracies, with political stability. [Please heed, everybody]  If there is to be a world beyond pain and self-pity, it is necessary to fix the umbrella.

The umbrella, by the way, is the welfare state--tattered by neoliberalism, by market-worship, by capital's insistence that everything that anyone needs ought to be making a profit for somebody--and we can't take the continued existence of ours for granted any more than the British can.