[LINK] jsburbidge on what happened with Brexit and Donald Trump

[rfmcdonald]

The opinions of jsburbidge, rarely expressed, always deserve sharing. His thoughts on what led to Brexit and Trump's election makes sense, identifying racism and economic dislocation as not necessarily enough to explain what happened.

A third analysis points at anger at fundamentally cultural change: Brexit voters who are Little Englanders, Americans who are nostalgic for the 1950's, people who really don't want to face anthropogenic climate change and thereby have to change their habits, rural dwellers whose communities are being hollowed out by internal shifts towards the cities as farming becomes more agribusiness and countries as a whole become more urban, Evangelicals who resent increasing secularism and immigrants with other religions (whether different faiths such as Islam or just different variants such as Hispanic Catholicism).

Resentment of immigration may slot into this model better than into point (2). Importing Mexicans to pick crops (à la George Murphy) does not obviously displace US workers; likewise, the NHS nurse from Poland at a local English hospital has probably been hired in the absence of sufficient English applicants for nursing positions. Both, however, are markers of change.

This fits many aspects of the general situation relatively well.

First, there's basically nothing that can be done about it. It's all very well to declaim "Turn back the universe and give me yesterday", but it won't work. Even a "succesful" imposition of political reaction does not restore the social fabric of the past (the German states of 1825 were not very much like the German states of 1785, regardless of what Prince Metternich was able to do).

I'm willing to bet that one of Trump's promises which will not be fulfilled is the full mass deportation of "unlawful immigrants": too many economic interests would be impacted (fruit is already withering on the vine in some areas because of an insufficient workforce). There may be a few dramatic staged raids of some form or another, but there will be nothing systematic and long-term. (Ditto with the wall: Congress is not about to authorize that expense.)

There's more, including suggestions on a long-term strategy, at his Livejournal.