Guest post: People like being angry at things
Originally a comment by Claire on They’ve done it.
As an expat Brit, I was in two minds whether to vote in the referendum. After all, it seemed a bit cheeky to insist on a voice on it when I’d no intention of returning to the UK. But the rhetoric changed my mind. I quickly became very concerned that the Brexit campaign were willing to lie brazenly and hand-wave any demands for details on how any number of important structural changes would be managed. So I got registered and voted, for my nephews and nieces too young to vote, for my other family members who’s lives and job prospects depended on us remaining in the EU. It was not enough, but I was glad in the end that I had voted, because I would have felt so much worse if I had not.
As it is, I’m angry and scared about what’s happening to my home country. A portion of the population has always been given to Little Englandism and rosy-colored visions of a Britain that was not nearly as good as they make out (unless you were a well-off white man) and a nostalgia for a bygone Empire that is as grotesque as it is anachronistic. But I’d never before realized how widespread the attitude was.
I’m not starry-eyed about the EU, in fact I’ve been sharply critical of how they’ve dealt with problems such as the financial difficulties in Greece or the generally poor transparency of many of its institutions. But fixing those problems was achievable if Britain had only been willing to try and effect change. We weren’t the only country to want to see reform and could have sought partners to modernize the EU in a way that reflected the 21st century world.
The EU was built in part in the feverish hangover of WWII. We’d been through two unimaginably large and utterly preventable human catastrophes before we’d even made it halfway through the century. The EU came out of that desire not to descend into the madness a third time. But it brought all kinds of benefits none of us could have anticipated. The Remain campaign did not communicate these very effectively, and I think people like being angry at things more than they like respecting dull plodding things like diplomacy and technocratic progress. But working conditions for workers, especially at the low end of the income scale, were much improved by European laws and directives. All those people who voted for Brexit overwhelmingly came from those most likely to be hurt by the disappearance of those regulations.
The EU will survive our exit, I’m sure. We will be the poorer for it, and I don’t think it’s egotistical to say I think that we did make important contributions to the European project that will be missed in the future. But ultimately, leaving will hurt us way more.
Much like many conservative voters here. Many of the people I know have no clue what the government does for them; they have heard so much about “overregulation” and “welfare queens” and very little about the many things they will lose if the Republicans have their way. They have been brought up on the illusion of the self-made – someone who has worked for everything they have and has been given nothing, but sees their earnings sucked away to be given to people who refuse to get off their butts to do an honest day’s work.
Needless to say, this is not true. This has never been true. Everyone alive in this country is receiving extensively from the government every single day. I tried one day to count the things that were impacting my day, but I was exhausted before I got finished with the energy I was using to cook my breakfast, and gave up. If I’d tried to count everything on the drive to work – not just the roads, but the stop signs and lights, the police protection, etc – I would not have gotten to work on time. But few people understand this, because if the government does something right, it goes unreported. So all they hear is the FEMA disaster following Katrina, the wars and rumors of wars, and, of course, welfare, welfare, welfare (which actually IS doing something good, but it is counted as something bad because reasons – mostly racist reasons).
The states that scream and holler the most about “big government” tend to be the ones that are getting back more than they spend in federal taxes – the states that are the most likely to vote reliably Democratic are the ones that are getting back less than they put in, but recognize that the money is being used to lift everyone, not just their own little gated community of white upper class entrepreneurs.
Yeah. The thing the government & taxes haters overlook is that rich people couldn’t get rich without all that government spending. It takes a lot of infrastructure for people to be able to get rich – cops, courts, judges; railroads, roads, freeways; schools, community colleges, universities; banks & stock markets that couldn’t exist without cops and jduges; and so on. Self-made is a myth.
I’d like to know how. Britain and others have been fighting for reform for decades without any movement from the EU which, to remind you, is so corrupt that it has has never been able to pass a budget by its auditors. The fact is that the entrenched political interests in the EU have no incentive to reform. What would, say, Juncker gain by it? And the people of the EU have no mechanism to enforce reform. The way Greece was treated was a huge scandal, for example, but not one official lost his or her job because there is no democratic process to hold such people to account.
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
But government graft and corruption are not a myth. The huge farming subsidies within the EU, for example, are not being paid to lonely crofters struggling on a hillside, but generally to super-wealthy landowners, many of whom are ‘farmers’ in name only. This sort of thing gets on people’s nerves. Justice matters and it often surprises the technocrats, who measure everything in money, that so many people are willing to suffer financial losses if it means a more just, more democratic society as they see it..
Pinkeen – this was sort of the point that was being made. It is, at least in America, precisely those super-wealthy landowners (many of whom are farmers in name only here, too) who cry and whine and wail about government “handouts”. They are not self-made, they are government supported, and the money is theirs, they believe. But they look down on teachers, for instance, who are working for the government, and supposedly have soft jobs with enormous wages (not any teachers I’ve known, but then, I actually know what teachers do) for doing nothing of any merit at all. They teach their kids, yes, but what? Oh, my, god, secular science and secular history.
Your point does not negate mine or Ophelia’s at all.