The parallels with the Trump campaign could not be more obvious. Trump praised Brexit as a resounding revolt against “rule by the global élite.” White working-class voters, ignored or disdained by the richer, better-educated political class, seem to have decided that, since Europe was doing very little for them, they had nothing to lose by leaving it. (Nor did love letters from Julie Delpy, arguments by Nobel laureates, threats by George Soros, or pleas by David Beckham and Bob Geldof make any difference.) You can imagine a similar conclusion if American voters were asked to decide what Washington was doing for them, and whether to revert to states’ rights on everything. And how eerie that, just as in current American political life, it was President Obama—brought in by Prime Minister David Cameron to tell the British that they would be at the back of the line if they left the E.U.—who became the bogeyman in the British war of the populists against the élites. In a Fox News-style turn, the economists and politicians were written off by Michael Gove, one of the leading Brexiteers, as “experts,” of whom “the British people are sick.” [...]
Of course, both the Brexit campaign and the Trump movement have tended to coalesce around the threat of immigration. In both cases, there are two streams of anxiety. One is economic: poorer, hungrier, more eager workers from nearby countries (Mexico; or Poland, Slovakia, Spain) are taking jobs that somehow “belong” to native populations (even if those native people seem disinclined to do them) and are swallowing up much-needed public resources, like education and health care. The second anxiety is cultural and religious—which is to say, fear of Islam. Would the Brexiteers have achieved their small majority without the migrants from Syria, and Angela Merkel’s hospitality toward them? It’s doubtful. Farage’s right-wing ukip produced a scandalous poster, with the words “BREAKING POINT: The EU has failed us all.” It showed a photograph, from 2015, of a massive, snaking crowd of Syrian migrants, mostly young men, at the Slovenian border. The implication was raucously clear, just as it is when Trump regularly inflates the number of Syrian immigrants admitted by the Obama Administration: they are swamping us.
At the same time, leaders of the Brexit campaign seem to want Britain to remain part of a common market, if not part of an overweening political bureaucracy. This makes sense, since most of them are members of the Conservative Party, people committed (as was Margaret Thatcher, who campaigned for British entry into the European Common Market, in 1975) to free enterprise. But wouldn’t a single market entail the more or less free movement of labor—the Briton who goes off to work in Paris, the Greek who comes to teach in Bristol? Asked this very question on TV, a day after the momentous vote, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament and leading pro-Brexit campaigner, conceded as much. He was, he said, in favor of the free movement of labor, but keen to reduce unemployed European citizens’ automatic right to free British services. We could be like Norway, he said, a country that never joined the E.U. When an exasperated interviewer suggested that this vision was completely at odds with the dark threats of his campaign, and its promise to “control” immigration to Britain, he replied that leaving the E.U. was never likely to have had a drastic effect on immigration levels. And notice the entirely expected conclusion of such a Norwegian-style compromise: the “acceptable” immigrant, such as the French banker who arrives in London with a generous contract in hand, gets to stay, while the eager but unemployed Pole, just looking for work in a richer country like the U.K., gets screwed. And the Syrian refugee, unaffected by Brexit, comes anyway.
