This year, people all over the world are facing a stark choice: to maintain faith in a flawed status quo or to sharply break from the past several decades of social and political consensus. It seem as if we’re always being told that we live in a significant Moment—that today’s developments represent a revolutionary, “disruptive” shift from the past. These exhortations, self-serving as they usually are, should normally be taken with a grain (if not a handful) of salt.
Still, there is increasingly little doubt that 2016 is shaping up to be such a Moment. The upcoming Brexit referendum and American presidential election are just the most prominent examples. In each case, large segments of society have decided that their future lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the past. And whether these groups realize their goals will prove critical for years to come. Put simply, their victory will profoundly threaten the post-World War II progressive globalist project that, for all its flaws, has produced unprecedented gains in terms of tolerance, human development, and peace.
In Britain, if recent polls are to be believed, close to a majority of citizens seems ready to cast aside more than forty years of government policy and leave the European Union. Some of the concerns motivating the Leave campaign are surely legitimate. The EU is plagued by bureaucracy and ineffective institutions, and the technocrats administering those institutions are widely perceived as insensitive to those outside Brussels. And the Union’s unblinking pro-austerity extremism has resulted in tremendous suffering—and not just in Greece and its Southern European brethren.
Unfortunately, these problems—which could be solved by loosening the Euro’s straightjackets and adopting a more expansionary fiscal policy, not to mention improving EU’s democratic institutions—are not what’s led to the recent rise in support for Brexit. Instead, that can be traced to the increasingly xenophobic and nativist tone of the campaign. Indeed, a recent Leave campaign poster by the UK Independence Party (a right-wing, populist group that has soared in popularity), which has been criticized for its resemblance to Nazi-era propaganda, demonstrates the degree to which anti-immigration hostility seemingly motivates the campaign to escape the EU. Even more mainstream Leave leaders, like Boris Johnson, strategically invoke this hostility, equating remaining in the EU with being “locked in the back of the car, driven by someone with an imperfect command of English.”
The Leave proponents have channeled their citizens’ legitimate anger towards economic inequality and malaise and redirected it outwards, against the Eastern Europeans who “take” British jobs, or, even worse in their eyes, the “hordes” of Muslim migrants who take advantage of the British welfare state without assimilating its “traditional” values. In doing so, the campaign does great damage to the values that underlie the concept of a united Europe: pluralism, internationalism, and a forward-looking tolerance. For all its flaws, we must remember that entrenched conflicts consumed Europe for centuries, culminating in two horrific world wars; since the union’s founding, there has been no major armed conflict between its member states. Winston Churchill himself advocated for a “United States of Europe,” to provide Europe “a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom.” That structure has perhaps never been closer to collapse.
This dismissal of pluralist globalism is, of course, not limited to Britain. The rise of Donald Trump in the United States presidential election represents the very same ideology. Whether or not he can win in November (and right now it’s looking quite doubtful), Trump has shown that a significant fraction of Americans reject our increasingly diverse, multicultural society, and desire far less engagement on the international stage.
Still, there is increasingly little doubt that 2016 is shaping up to be such a Moment. The upcoming Brexit referendum and American presidential election are just the most prominent examples. In each case, large segments of society have decided that their future lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the past. And whether these groups realize their goals will prove critical for years to come. Put simply, their victory will profoundly threaten the post-World War II progressive globalist project that, for all its flaws, has produced unprecedented gains in terms of tolerance, human development, and peace.
In Britain, if recent polls are to be believed, close to a majority of citizens seems ready to cast aside more than forty years of government policy and leave the European Union. Some of the concerns motivating the Leave campaign are surely legitimate. The EU is plagued by bureaucracy and ineffective institutions, and the technocrats administering those institutions are widely perceived as insensitive to those outside Brussels. And the Union’s unblinking pro-austerity extremism has resulted in tremendous suffering—and not just in Greece and its Southern European brethren.
Unfortunately, these problems—which could be solved by loosening the Euro’s straightjackets and adopting a more expansionary fiscal policy, not to mention improving EU’s democratic institutions—are not what’s led to the recent rise in support for Brexit. Instead, that can be traced to the increasingly xenophobic and nativist tone of the campaign. Indeed, a recent Leave campaign poster by the UK Independence Party (a right-wing, populist group that has soared in popularity), which has been criticized for its resemblance to Nazi-era propaganda, demonstrates the degree to which anti-immigration hostility seemingly motivates the campaign to escape the EU. Even more mainstream Leave leaders, like Boris Johnson, strategically invoke this hostility, equating remaining in the EU with being “locked in the back of the car, driven by someone with an imperfect command of English.”
This dismissal of pluralist globalism is, of course, not limited to Britain. The rise of Donald Trump in the United States presidential election represents the very same ideology. Whether or not he can win in November (and right now it’s looking quite doubtful), Trump has shown that a significant fraction of Americans reject our increasingly diverse, multicultural society, and desire far less engagement on the international stage.
They, like the Brexit supporters, can point to serious problems, from a broken campaign-finance system to the decline of manufacturing and stable middle-class jobs. But they too primarily focus their ire on “outsiders”—to building walls, and to banning large classes of immigrants because of their religion or ethnicity. These policies (if they can even be called that) harken back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the Japanese internment camps, and the McCarthyite blacklists, a period of our history that many of us consider far in the past. Yet when Trump claims that he will “make America great again,” it’s not difficult to figure out that he and his supporters have precisely that time in mind.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Cox was a strong supporter of remaining in the EU. And, perhaps equally unsurprising, her killer, Thomas Mair, appears to be a right-wing extremist, who claims that his name is “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” When Mair attacked Cox, he reportedly shouted “Britain First,” presumably referring to a far-right nationalist group that calls for the return of “traditional British values” and the end of “Islamisation.” To make Britain “great” again, one might say.
To be clear, Cox’s killer is an outlier; he certainly doesn’t represent the Leave campaign’s mainstream. His actions, these groups argue, should be attributed to mental health issues, not nationalism—and definitely not anti-EU sentiment. (One wonders if they’d sing the same tune were his name Omar or Muhammed.)
But have no doubt, Mair is a foreseeable—if not an inevitable—outcome of that movement. Given that the Brexit vote has been cast as a defense of the “home” against foreign outsiders, is it much of a surprise that some would resort to more severe means, even violence, to further that defense? This populist nationalism depends on drawing hard lines in the sand, and when those lines are breached, a backlash is bound to follow--whether against the outsiders themselves, or their supporters. As one commentator observed, “rhetoric has consequences.”
For those of us who, like Jo Cox, believe in the progressive, globalist, multicultural project, it’s the time to push back on that rhetoric—not a time to stand still in silence. There is certainly no doubt that inequities and structural disadvantages are deeply embedded in our politics and the international system. But rather than cynically invoke those flaws as a means to turn inwards, we should work to correct them while protecting our hard-earned gains. Despite what the Brexit and Trump proponents claim, returning to our mythically “great” past will not create a better future. We will just be moving backwards.
