MAGA, AMERICA’S BREXIT

Most know of Great Britain’s break with the European Union referred to as Brexit. One decade ago, Britain voted to leave the EU to go it alone. The exit took four years to implement. The chief architect of Brexit was Boris Johnson, Donald Trump’s doppelganger. A key motivation in this British effort was an attempt to better control immigration and manage its borders. A former Conservative prime minister from the 1990s recently summarized the result, “Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker, and locked out of the richest free trade market in history.” It is estimated that, because of Brexit, the UK GDP is lower by around 7% costing each person about 3,300 pounds ($4,375) each year.

Brexit has clear parallels with today’s conservative MAGA and America First anti-globalist movement, especially its focus on border control and restrictive immigration policies. A century has passed since the United States embraced strict isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s. That isolationist turn helped deepen the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939 and brought mass unemployment, severe deflation, and thousands of bank failures. Protectionist tariffs further intensified the crisis by contributing to a collapse in international trade.

If you read that last paragraph and didn’t see history repeating itself under our conservative MAGA king Don, I think your Kool Aid needs a refill. It has been a century since an American isolationist resolve brought about catastrophe. That experiment with isolation ended with a world war and extreme sacrifices of blood and treasure. In the UK, their more modern isolationist effort has been by most estimates, a failure. Over half of Britons polled would like to undo Brexit and rejoin the EU.

Is it too late for America? Has the die been cast? Certainly, much damage has been done and some of it will take decades to repair. We will be paying the bill for this “administrative cock-up” to use an informal British phrase describing a bureaucratic blunder and gross mismanagement through systemic failure, disorganized process and avoidable mistakes with real-world impact. Trust the Brits to have a simple reference like “cock-up” for organizational disaster. They’ve certainly had some experience. America joins them and may have outdone them this time around.

Answering the question of “too late” we have the upcoming midterms where we can try to right the ship and stop taking on water. A democratic win in the House will slow the damage and a democratic majority in both houses will go a long way to getting the bilge pumps operational. None of which is to claim that Democrats have the answer, they just seem to do less damage.