Ian Tuttle:
If Brexit’s critics are right, the European Union should be glad to be rid of the United Kingdom.
In the wake of the U.K.’s decision to withdraw from the EU, the anti-Brexit crowd has leaped to explain the vote in stark terms. “The force that has been driving [‘Leave’ voters] is xenophobia,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, and at Esquire Charles Pierce explained: “Some of the Oldest and Whitest people on the planet leapt at a chance to vote against the monsters in their heads.” The Guardian’s Joseph Harker mused: “It feels like a ‘First they came for the Poles’ moment.” And blogger Anil Dash managed to squeeze all of these dismissive opinions into a single tweet: “We must learn from brexit: Elderly xenophobes will lie to pollsters to hide their racist views, then vote for destructive policies anyway.”
There was, to be sure, no absence of toxic rhetoric over the course of the U.K.’s referendum campaign. Especially in the weeks before Election Day, the cynicism of both sides was on full display. Still, the impulse to accuse 17 million people of racism seems an unhealthy one.
Alas, it’s not just the Brits. Less than 24 hours before polls closed in the U.K., President Obama responded to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the injunction against his 2014 executive amnesty by dismissing his critics as those who want “to wall [them]selves off from those who may not look like us right now, or pray like we do, or have a different last name.” He warned that America’s immigration policy does not “reflect its goodness,” and chided “spasms of politics around immigration and fear-mongering.”
The anti-Brexit crowd and the president do their critics an injustice. What is noteworthy is that they do it in the same way.
In the wake of Orlando, I noted: “The invocation of ‘hate’ has become a way of dismissing opponents by suggesting that their beliefs are beyond the reach of reason. You can’t debate someone who hates, because hatred precludes thought; it’s in the bones. If Republicans are motivated by ‘hate,’ then they are not legitimate political actors, because political life cannot be predicated on irrationality. Reason is our common ground.”
That same impulse is on display here, where “hate” has simply been replaced with some other emotion: “fear,” “xenophobia,” &c. The key is that the animating force is not thought; it’s raw, unconsidered passion.
That is not true when it comes to Brexit, and it’s not true when it comes to immigration in the U.S. But the powers-that-be have lost sight of that. Both sides of the Atlantic are dominated by liberal cosmopolitans who are no longer able to acknowledge the validity of any other worldview than their own.