No lessons learned
By Pete North - November 9, 2020
The customary victory speech was exactly what you’d have on your bingo card – fluffy words, speaking of the need for healing divisions and unifying the country. Every cliche in the book. The same baloney we got after Brexit – though none of it was sincere. It never is. Biden already plans to rejoin the Paris climate accords and the WHO, and there’ll be a flurry of executive orders reversing Trump’s policies in a matter of days.
There will be no attempt at reconciliation. No lessons will be learned (especially not by the media who are already congratulating themselves on a job well done). As far as the liberal establishment is concerned Trump was a blip – a temporary interruption, and now they will pick up where they left off, implementing the very same agenda that spawned Donald Trump to begin with.
This likely sets the tone for the next decade or more with each side engaged in a game of tug-o-war spending every administration undoing the work of the last in a perpetual stalemate. All the while nothing is ever resolved.
The way the left is behaving this week is as though a tyrant has been overthrown. For sure, Trump shares certain characteristics with megalomaniac dictators but nothing in his term has ever warranted the unhinged histrionics we have seen.
This is essentially how I imagine the remainers would have been had the succeeded in overturning the referendum. There would be no attempt to understand the sentiment behind the vote nor question the inadequacies of the EU. It would be rapidly brushed under the carpet and treated as an embarrassing blip that would never be mentioned again.
What the Bidenists (particularly the non-American variety) and remainers have in common is a righteous self-image of liberal progressivism, particularly on the world stage, regarding national sentiments as uncouth and gauche. Both Trump and Brexit shattered their cosy consensus and ever since they’ve been trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
If however, the American left thinks it has vanquished Trumpism it is sorely mistaken. Trump was very much a symptom – as was Brexit. Biden’s victory may have paused the insurgency but it has not gone away. It is unfinished business and while wokeism and the culture wars continue to stalk American politics, we will almost certainly be here again.
Brexit, however, does not have an undo button. If we are to ever rejoin it will more than likely be decades from now in which a very different country rejoins a very different entity. There is no reverse thrust on what Britain has set in motion. The arrival of Biden may influence the tone of Johnson’s government but cannot change the destination. Britain has left the EU and that is that.
Being, though, that the UK is now out on its own politically, it will have to bend to the peer pressure of global norms. We are already seeing from Johnson a resumption of the “leading on climate change” shtick, and as far as everything else goes, there is little to distinguish this government from its New Labour predecessor. Even the ERG hardliners have gone wet.
This causes some disquiet in the ranks of Brexiteers, already furious with the Tories over its bungled Covid strategy. The penny is starting to drop that freedom from the EU does not free us from globalisation or external political pressures. With the Tories set to maintain a bloated welfare state and keep aligned with the EU on climate and social regulation, while failing to tackle immigration, there is enough red meat to sustain a new right wing populist movement.
In both the USA and the UK there are divergent tribes with no sign of reconciliation, set to worsen as Covid takes its toll. Being that lessons on either side of the Atlantic have not been learned and life is not going to improve for the many in the coming decade, what the Americans think is all over may only just be getting its boots on.