Brexit: Why The Globalists Lost

There’s panic in the skyscrapers. A popular revolution against globalism is underway, and Britain has struck the first blow.

To the dismay of political, financial, and media elites, the country has chosen to put identity and sovereignty above a plus-one-or-minus-one change in GDP, and vote to leave the hated European Union. As with the USSR, the attempt to superimpose a manufactured civic identity over proud nation-states with rich and complex histories has run against the grain of human nature. The elites, so wrapped up in statecraft and economics, never paused to consider basic human psychology.

It’s not just Britain, you see. The revolution against globalism is, well, global. Britain may be leading the charge, but insurgents and rebels from D.C to Berlin are also hard at work tormenting their elitist overlords. Fired up by Britain’s example, eurosceptics across the continent are now demanding their own referendums. It’s a Berlin Wall moment.

The unelectable and unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels must be pissing themselves right now. They are losing one of the biggest crutches for a fragile alliance of countries that can’t pay their bills. (Fortunately, they still have the power to unilaterally grant themselves a monthly budget of 2,000 euros for trouser cleaning.)

Here at Breitbart, we always knew it would be OK. After all, Britain has a well-documented history of standing defiantly against tyrannical continental empires. We defeated the Spanish Armada, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. We were a bulwark against the USSR during the Cold War. Compared to all that, the low-energy efforts of crusty octogenarian globalists like George Soros were a walk into the park.

Admittedly, doubts crept in when Lindsay Lohan started livetweeting in favor of Remain. I mean, they already had Bob Geldof and Bono from U2 on their side! How dare voters defy the wishes of these philanthropic titans? Thankfully, even their tireless tweeting couldn’t pull it back for Remain.

Thanks to Nigel Farage, who has for 15 years been selflessly campaigning to abolish his own job (he’s a European Member of Parliament), June 23 looks set to become Britain’s own Independence Day. And, like he said, we didn’t even need to fire a shot! The Americans started their revolution with the “shot heard around the world.” The British, ever more refined than those gauche colonials, announced their freedom with a strike of the pencil.

Needless to say, leftists are quite mad. They’re now calling for old people to be stopped from voting, simply because they wanted to protect the youngsters from having to dress in hijabs. Twitter hasn’t been this upset since that gorilla got shot. France, of course, has been mad for a while: even before the vote to send the migrants from The Jungle to us if we decided to leave. Why? Are migrants bad? I mean if unlimited immigration is fine then that’s hardly a punishment, is it, France?

Then there’s Scotland. For the second time in two years, our grumpy, ungrateful ginger cousins in the north are threatening to leave us. Scotland … famed for sucking up English tax money and for producing angry left-wing comedians and whiskey that’s even worse than Ireland’s.

I’m not sure many of us will be too upset to lose these ferocious European champions. I mean, there’s a reason the Emperor Hadrian anticipated Trump by about two thousand years.

Britain made a clear statement today– she wants to be free, she wants to improve. In short she wants to be great again.

But what does this mean for globalism, the ideology beloved of cultural elites, banks, the media, academics, and Silicon Valley, that is currently under siege from Trump in the U.S, Brexiters in the U.K, and populists on the continent?

Firstly, it’s a total rebuke to the normal tactics used by media and cultural elites to crush popular uprisings. They must really be panicking. How could so many people not do what the media and their political leaders told them to do?  Could it be that branding voters you don’t like racist, bigoted, or “low-information” simply doesn’t work anymore?

For years, global elites and their allies in the commentariat have tried to brand their opponents as kooks, conspiracy theorists and, failing that, as racists, sexists homophobes and so on. But it’s not working any more. In both the U.S. and Europe, such tactics are now likely to backfire, driving more support to populists.

Trump, of course, is the American version of Brexit. Little wonder that he both predicted a leave vote and, unlike Obama, praised it when it actually happened. Like Trump, every single naysayer spouts doom and gloom about Brexit, but both will be long-term boons for their nations. (Despite all the fearmongering prior to the vote, Obama has now rushed to reaffirm America’s alliance with Britain.)

Another tactic deployed by globalists has been to insist that they know their numbers (strange, seeing as the E.U. is economically haemophiliac and the Great Recession happened on their watch). Throughout the referendum campaign, they repeatedly told voters that voting leave would herald economic catastrophe. The currency would collapse! The housing market would collapse! The world would implode!

These arguments were foolish for several reasons. Firstly, everyone in Britain outside of the super-wealthy wants the housing market to crash — it’ll mean lower rents and lower house prices for ordinary people. Yet another sign of how out-of-touch the defenders of Remain were.

Secondly, predictions of economic doom are hopelessly off the mark. Sure, there’s some turbulence in the markets — that happens after every dramatic political event. But to argue that Britain needs to tether itself to the likes of Greece and Spain to remain economically competitive is ludicrous. It’s like arguing that Israel needs to join an economic union with Palestine and Syria. Bigger is not always better. Britain, like Israel and other high-IQ, high-skilled economies, will thrive on its own.

Indeed, Israel also provides a cautionary tale in the event that the E.U. tries to punish Britain for leaving. Tariffs and sanctions from the world market (which of course hates Israel) was what forced the small country to innovate into the future. So many “experts” have predicted that the U.K. will founder outside Europe. Britain, also famed for its plucky, indomitable national character, will likely prove the world wrong and bypass Europe to work with Asia and America.

But the bigger reason why what became known as “Project Fear” failed was much more obvious, and exposes a fatal flaw in the globalist ideology: ordinary people sometimes think about more than whether the economy goes up or down. They think about their nation and their culture, and what remaining in a supranational entity with increasingly open borders might mean for that. They think about political sovereignty, independence, and national pride.

Elites sneer at these concerns as the foolish, provincial preoccupations of “low-information voters,” yet they are deeply embedded in human nature, particularly in the search for belonging. Against these primal instincts, the cold world of the Davos-men and the Strasbourg-men, with their identical suits and their obsession with GDP, simply can’t compete.

It’s simple when you think about it. On a personal level, is money the most important thing to you? It’s important, yes, but only the most obsessive city trader would say it’s the most important thing. Sometimes you have to give it up for the things you care about, like your country. Churchill famously promised only “blood, sweat and tears” during his premiership, and the Brits loved him for it.

So why did the Remain camp think that the threat of a little economic turbulence would be enough to frighten voters? The idea of sacrificing a little bit of material comfort to defend something greater, like national sovereignty, is alien to today’s global elites. That’s why they didn’t understand their opponents, and that’s why they lost.

This is the fatal weakness of globalists. They don’t understand, and in fact sometimes loathe, the idea of difference. These are people, remember, who regardless of their cultural and national background went to the same internationally-renowned universities, interned at the same multinational banks, and attend the same international summits. For them, there really is no difference between the globalist from London and the globalist from Istanbul. They look the same, speak the same, and when they meet, they likely reminisce about the same experiences. From Strasbourg to Dubai to Davos, globalism is a nation unto itself.

So it’s little wonder that these people just don’t understand why the plebs back home are so attached to their national identities, and will fight so hard to defend them. They’re constantly frustrated that their voters won’t get with the program, put down their flags, and become faceless, rootless members of a global society. We predict they will continue to be frustrated.

The blindness of globalists to difference has been disastrous to western culture. The refusal of elites to acknowledge, for instance, that the Muslim world is dominated by one of the most hate-filled, bigoted ideologies in human history is a major reason for their current predicament, and certainly a motivating force behind Brexit.

Angela Merkel’s policy of importing millions of Muslims to Europe is an act of cultural suicide. It’s much like a capitalist country opening its borders to millions of working-class Russians in 1917. Sure, they might not all be Bolsheviks, but it’s still not a clever thing to do. Merkel herself looks more like Dr. Evil every day, with a worse hairdo.

But even if Islamic countries had peaceful cultures, the British people would still rebel at having to accept millions of people from foreign cultures hostile to assimilation. Because that would still be a challenge to their distinctiveness — the connection between national identity, national sovereignty, and a culture built up over thousands of years.

For millions of increasingly angry, and freshly politically motivated people, that’s more important than the strength of the pound. And that’s why the globalists will lose.

Allum Bokhari is a reporter for Breitbart. He can be followed on Twitter at@LibertarianBlue. Milo Yiannopoulos is a senior editor for Breitbart. He can be followed at @Nero. Email them at abokhari@breitbart.com and milo@breitbart.com