The Imperial Myths Driving Brexit - and Trump Supporters

A blimp depicting Boris Johnson hovers near a statue of Winston Churchill.Simon Dawson / Reuters).

As noted in prior posts, the parallels between pro-Brexit voters in the United Kingdom and Trump voters are considerable. Both groups long for a glorious mythical - and much whiter - past and seem willing to commit economic and national suicide in order to chase after a past that never quite was as they would remember it.  Both groups are also obsessed with a myth of their respective nation's exceptionalism which typically means they do not want to work with other nations and they seemingly never are open to learning from other nations.  Worse yet, only a sanitized version of the past is remembered and past misdeeds and horrific mistakes and failures are ignored as if they never occurred. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Brexit and the myth of British exceptionalism that in so many ways tracks what one sees among those wearing MAGA hats and attending Trump rallies.  Here are highlights:

For more than three years, the world has watched Britain attempt to act on the result of its 2016 referendum and leave the European Union. Yet while the causes of the Brexit vote were complex, the causes of the catastrophic handling of the Brexit process might be familiar to anyone versed in imperial and post-imperial history.

They stem from what appears to be a belief in British exceptionalism: the idea that Britain is inherently different from, and superior to, other nations and empires.

Margaret Thatcher asserted British exceptionalism with regard to the EU in a 1988 speech, and each of the past three prime ministers has approached the EU from that standpoint—believing that Britain deserves preferential treatment and more-than-equal status.

They have all also believed in their own personal exceptionalism. . . . Now Boris Johnson is voluntarily manufacturing a crisis over no deal—in which Britain would leave the EU without any agreement on the rules and regulations governing how it would trade and work with the bloc—that could send damaging shock waves through Britain, Ireland, and the rest of the EU.

There has been much discussion of the roles of history and memory in relation to Brexit. It may be easy to overstate a simplistic, literalist connection between the empire—imagined as glorious, and unjustly lost—and the impulse to leave the EU. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that embedded in Brexit is a form of “Make Britain great again.” Sharper parallels are perhaps drawn between Britain’s collective recollection of its part in World War II, heavily mythologized as the moment it stood alone against Adolf Hitler, and the attitude of Brexit supporters to the isolation and hardship Brexit may bring.

While the myths constructed around the history of empire and World War II reinforce British exceptionalism, they are contradictory. The first casts Britain as a superpower; the second as a lone, plucky underdog.

Brexit is a public withdrawal from a voluntary union; Suez [Canal crisis] was a covert invasion of a sovereign state. They are wholly different. Yet there is a familiarity to the grand aspirations undercut by slapdash and delusional strategic planning; to the frantic rush to act, even as it becomes clear that most or all of the options are damaging; to leaders fixated on a path that many can see will probably end badly.

In general, Britain remembers Suez as a blip in what is widely viewed as a mostly well-intentioned and competent imperial policy. Far from ending British exceptionalism, the disaster has been used to reinforce it. Suez can be framed as a unique aberration if it is blamed on what is erroneously held to have been a betrayal by the United States, and on the folly of one man, the physically and mentally exhausted Prime Minister Anthony Eden. That heads off more troubling questions about whether there were deeper problems with cabinet decision making, military advice, foreign policy, the political culture as a whole, and even the nation’s understanding of itself.

Exceptionalism is again visible in what was by most metrics a far bigger disaster than Suez or Amritsar: the partition of India and Pakistan, which left between 1 and 2 million people dead, created 10 million to 20 million refugees, and established a hostile relationship between successor states that threatens global security to this day.

The last British viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, has been blamed ever since for speeding Britain’s exit deadline up. What he achieved by that was to ensure that most of the fallout did not happen on Britain’s watch. . . . . Only in the days and weeks after partition did the shocking reports of death and destruction ramp up, and so British exceptionalism was able to remain unscathed. The British could sigh sadly at the appalling outcome, and murmur “après nous, le déluge.” The writer Pankaj Mishra has described a “malign incompetence” common to Mountbatten and the Brexiteers.

A British leadership that wanted to deliver Brexit safely and was not in thrall to exceptionalism might have learned from past mistakes. Suez might have taught it to prefer reality over fantasy, compromise and conciliation over arrogance and vaingloriousness. Partition might have taught it to respect and understand complexity rather than oversimplify difficult problems, to make a plan before setting tight deadlines. Both might have taught it that you should never, ever imagine you’ve had enough of experts.

But to learn from mistakes you must confront them, and exceptionalism means you never do. . . . Brexit is exposing flaws in the British political system and culture, but they are not new. Exceptionalist thinking has long helped insulate that system from the criticism and reform it needs.

For advocates and critics of Brexit alike, it may be tempting to imagine a golden age in which Britain was competent, reliable, stable, and sensible. Looking at its history, though, if it turns out to be none of those things, we shouldn’t be surprised.

So much of this likewise describes the United States.

Can The GOP Save Itself By Looking to the British Tories?

As the Republican Party continues to spin in a seeming death spiral, some say that the party should take lessons from how the British Tories breathed new life into their at the time moribund political party.  A piece in Politico, in fact makes this argument.  The problem, as I see it is that the Tories did not have the now systemic problem that confronts the GOP: a solid core base of Christofascists and white supremacists who have no desire to adopt more humane and logical policies.  With this element of the GOP base, hate, fear and an embrace of backward ignorance are the guiding lights and nothing is likely to change that.  Until these elements are driven from the GOP, expect little change, in my view.  Here are article highlights:

Scorched earth tactics. Pandering to people’s worst fears. Ugly and alienating rhetoric. Extreme positions that offend vast swaths of the electorate. Yes folks, this has been the apparent political strategy of the GOP over the past eight years. Donald Trump? If the Republicans are in crisis, he’s not the cause. He’s the symptom.

The dawning of that reality is perhaps why so many obituaries are now being written for the Republican Party—some with relish, others with sorrow—and why the GOP establishment is desperately looking for a white knight such as House Speaker Paul Ryan to save the day at the convention in Cleveland in July.

I say this based on my own experience as former senior adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, where I helped turn around a “missing, presumed dead” right-of-center party and implement a reforming conservative agenda in government.

I’m more than aware that there is no automatic read-across from British to American politics. But having moved to California, taught at Stanford, and co-founded Crowdpac (a tech startup focusing on U.S. politics), I can now view with a bit more detachment how the British experience might help the GOP in 2016.

Here is the most basic lesson: The Republican Party’s problems cannot be fixed by better “messaging” or organization. It goes much deeper than that. This was the mistake the British Conservatives made for many years, believing that things like better “outreach” or a stronger online presence would turn things around. No, it’s all about what you fundamentally think, your ideology, and whether it meets the needs of real people. The gap between Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, for example, is nothing compared with the much larger gap between the GOP and modern, mainstream America. The Republican Party cannot close that gap unless it makes itself more human, more in touch. And to do that it needs to change its policy prescriptions in a profound way.

In 2005, after Tony Blair of the Labor Party won his third general election in a row, a postmortem for the Conservatives revealed that the top reasons for not voting Tory were a perception that the party was “for the rich,” and that it was “old-fashioned.” By old-fashioned, the British voters meant that Conservative politicians were out of touch with—and indeed seemed to disapprove of—modern life as it is lived: hostile toward working women, ethnic minorities, gay people and young people.

On top of all that, political commentators described the Conservatives as “the stupid party” for relying on simplistic, shop-worn ideological bromides, and “the economics party” for prioritizing tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal calculation over all else.

Ring any bells?

For many years, Republican leaders have allowed—no, encouraged—conservatism to be seen as an inhuman, cruel ideology, dogmatically obsessed with a small number of issues, driven by a destructive mania to oppose at all costs, lacking any interest in understanding (let alone responding constructively to) the real life problems of most people in America.

The postmortem was doomed to failure even when it was published four years ago, and the explanation lies in this short but devastating quote from the document: “We need to do a better job connecting people to our policies.”

Well yes. But have you ever considered the possibility that it’s the policies that might be the problem, and not the presentation of them? Now before anyone starts screaming “Judas” at me, I just want to make clear that I’m talking about policy, not philosophy. For a great political party, philosophy should be unchanging. But for a great political party to survive, its philosophy should be applied anew, with fresh policy, to changing circumstances. This the GOP has signally failed to do.

A more human conservatism would simply not tolerate the oligarchic economy that America has become. It would mount an all-out assault on the centralization of power that is allowing giant special interests to fleece taxpayers, rip off consumers, exploit workers and damage society. It would force real, market-based competition into every sector: not just the banks but the airlines, the insurance companies, the telecom providers, the agriculture and food industry, the education system, yes even the political system by moving from corrupt funding to crowdfunding.

We made some important shifts on key social and cultural issues: In 2006, Cameron brought the annual party conference to a standing ovation with his backing for marriage (and the society-strengthening commitment it represents), “whether it’s between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man.”

And there were symbolic changes too: a young, informal leader who rode his bike to the House of Commons; a visible demonstration of community commitment through public volunteerism by Conservative candidates and activists around the country—and yes, the inevitable new party logo, a tree in place of the previous torch. But this was no greenwashing—the party dropped its climate change skepticism and urged the electorate to “Vote Blue, Go Green.” (Blue is the color of the Conservative Party in the UK).

How might some of the British Conservative experience work on this side of the Atlantic with the GOP? Plainly, the party would need to surrender some of its more unreasonable dogmas, like blanket resistance to any action on climate change. And it would need to experiment. Among Silicon Valley folks, there is an idea that infuses everything we do: prototyping. The idea is to take a concept—a hypothesis—and throw it out there quickly in its roughest manifestation to see how people react. Even if it’s completely wrong, it’s only through testing it with real people that you can validate not just your solution but whether your conception of the problem is even right to begin with.

A modern Republican Party would therefore not just rail against Trump, but develop an agenda that takes the anger and the energy and the desire for a shake-up that his candidacy represents, and turns it into a program for change.

A more human conservatism would go beyond the stunted, limited debates on education and health care in this country, beyond “scrap Common Core” and “repeal Obamacare” and understand that the very systems we have set up to run these personal, intimate things—teaching our children and looking after us when we’re sick—have become too big and are out of date. Factory schools churn out children equipped for the previous century not this one . . .

Here, we need to learn both from what we instinctively know and what modern science now teaches us through advances in fields like neuroscience, social psychology and behavioral economics. If we want to address the causes of poverty, and not just its symptoms, the single most important factor is the family, because children’s life chances are determined before they even get to school.

To be fair, Hillary Clinton seems to understand this priority and it’s reflected in her policy program. Don’t worry, this is not the start of a “Republicans for Clinton” argument. I’m just saying that a grown-up, attractive, electable party ought to be able to acknowledge when opponents get things right.

In the end, the successful modernization of the GOP will not be accomplished by committees or reports or another postmortem—or premortem—from the RNC. The lesson from Britain is that you can have all the ideas in the world, all the policy documents and think-tank studies and articles like this one. But lasting change happens only when a bold leader sets out a big vision.