The morning after the Brexit vote, one imagines Britons awakening with a similar sense of bewilderment, and a diametrically opposed sense of outcome.  Those who voted Leave, woke up with a tentative sense of blissful relief, as if a migrainous pressure behind their eyes had been lifted with the rising sun, and they could safely view the rays for the first time in a long time without averting their sight.  The Remainers awoke also bewildered, but adjusting to a massive hangover painfully focusing the reality of a resultant wakeup from a decades long bender.  Both likely thought, “What just happened?”.  What just happened will take some time to sort out, but the makings of something very significant for people in Britain, and beyond, has clearly and irreversibly occurred.

The outcome of the momentous vote in Great Britain on June 23rd to leave formal membership in the European Union spared no one’s worldview.  In the stunning bullseye of the outcome stood the Prime Minister of Great Britain himself, David Cameron.  Completely misinterpreting his constituents fundamental concerns with an ever more encompassing elitist need to control their lives, Cameron felt he could use fear tactics regarding a world after Leave without elitists’ guarantees of stability for all would be enough to impel the great undereducated to support an establishment who would look after them. He was so wrong, that it appears his political mandate so recently secured in the parliamentary elections of 2015,  has been scuttled.  He has announced his intent to resign. The British people spoke in 2015, and thus they spoke again.  Like most leaders who, upon retaining power, assume it is all about them, Cameron found out that both his comprehensive victory in 2015 and his crashing defeat in 2016, were decidedly not about him.  Likewise, the American President Obama, who likes to declare in profound elitist egocentrism  every time an opposing opinion to his worldview gains traction, “This is not the America we want,”  discovered that the people of Great Britain didn’t find his preening intervention in the issue helpful in the least.   It turns out British citizens wanted to let Obama know, “This is not the Britain we want.”

What has transpired I suspect, is a very natural human reaction to excess.  When the Industrial Revolution brought for the first time a means by which individuals could achieve the position of kings without a hereditary portfolio and in the interval of a single lifetime, the benefits were profound, but so were the excesses.  As wealth spilled out from the exclusive domain of royalty and clergy,  millions of people attained the benefits of a meaningful life filled with both security and bounty.  Lives progressively became less the fight for survival then the search for personal worth and meaning.  The elites were progressively shunted aside to directional forces determined by the proletariat and burgeoning middle class.  Transportation became universal. Food became plentiful. A life now stable became increasingly worthwhile to maintain one’s health.  All good things. However, the darker impulses were also apparent.  The individualism left other important communal outcomes wanting.  The environment sustained critical damage. Morality became a relic, with diminished roles for family, increasing pleasure absorption, and an increasingly bitter sense of being left out, once the reality of opportunities for success was progressively available to all.  The most aggressively destructive forces in the twentieth century were not led by the elites, but rather the out of control proletariat that coopted nations into tools of domination.  Common men led the most egregious – the journalist Mussolini Fascist Italy, the failed painter Hitler Germany, the would be priest Stalin, the pseudo intellectual Mao.  Worse than their own perverted sense of progress was their willingness and ability to draw millions like them into armies of mass destruction.

The world that barely survived this excess turned to elitists to save them.  Post war communal arrangements were designed to soften the worst traits of nearly destroyed world of the out of control individualism and national primitivism.  The new meme of the elites was “globalism”. Individuals, and the nations they personified would subvert their baser tendencies to a global sharing through the guidance of elites.  Companies in competition would consolidate into global corporations in sync with shared values. Nations in competition would align with others to redistribute resources, regulate excesses, and degenerate their uniqueness.  Shared money, shared language shared aspirations, shared outcomes would remove the calamitous instincts of individuals to ‘get ahead’, and the world would forever grow beyond the need for violence, greed, and flag waving that got us into all this trouble in the first place.  The new wars would be against other – climate, division, asymmetry, and sexuality.  Sure there would be some unbalanced aspects.  Elites would preserve their world and flourish.  The rest would see the benefits of the elites beneficence – just like  in the olden times.

The Elites – the Harvard trained Obama and the Eton and Oxford prepared Cameron – could not comprehend that the average individual might want to bring some meaning to their lives by living their lives differently.  The Elites had extended their altruism to the point where they demanded to provide solutions for aspects of life where there were no identified problems to solve. Brexit was not so much a negation of all that came before but a democratic break to the undemocratic impulses of those who would determine that the future is a settled science of vast bureacracies, infinite regulations, removal of moral constraints, and destruction of free will and individual opportunity.

The morning sunrise after Brexit brings the faintly uncomfortable sense of a world less predictable.  As Groucho Marx cogently once said, he would be uncomfortable belonging to any club that would have him as a member. As a result of Brexit, older forces may have to be monitored for and deftly dealt with.  Germany’s natural inclination to dominate the continent and to gaze toward the East. Great Britain’s tenuous hold on its own unified sovereignity with such a close but divergent opinion as to the best course for its future. America’s isolationist tendencies and longing for a simplier world when it could self gaze safely behind a moat of surrounding oceans.

The better option is likely a form of compromise that preserves the best of what both elites and proliterians have to offer, without allowing the worst characteristics of each to see a world better off without each doing its part.   Thanks to a bunch of conflicted but resolute Britons who trusted themselves, the world has a chance again to take a breath, and breathe the beautiful air of freedom.  This particular sunrise, for those of us who still man the Ramparts of Civilization,  is one moment worthy of the sentiments of Rule Britainnia :

The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
“Britons never will be slaves.”