The party left them!

In the American Spectator, Dov Fischer writes about last night's election victory by Boris Johnson and his Conservatives in Great Britain. But, what is his prediction for our election in America?

So many of these factors at play in the British vote parallel American electoral realities. The Democrats of John Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan, and Henry Jackson days are long gone. The party has gone off the deep end, and many Independents explain that they never left the party — the party left them. The Democrat Congress has wasted the nation’s year, failing to do the “People’s Business” but instead dallying over an impeachment that is dead on arrival. The public is disgusted. Many voters who have their concerns about aspects of President Trump’s personality and who may feel comfortable criticizing him in polls will be voting for him and down the Republican line in November because the Democrat alternative will be unfathomable and intolerable. The ethnic Catholic blue-collar working class of the Rust Belt states of the Midwest, often thought of comprising a Democrat “impenetrable blue wall,” have returned to the Republicans as they did during the years of the Reagan coalition. The same has happened in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Iowa. If Americans value freedom as Brits do, the Dems are chopped meat in November. But thanks to the Trump economy, there should many fine bartender job openings available for their brightest stars to return to.

Read about the British election here.

An election coming up in December in Britain

In FrontPage Magazine, Katie Hopkins explains what is going on in Britain with Brexit. Read her very informative post here.

It is all about economics (and Trump)

This morning in the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has a report on

The Brexit Deal, The EU, and the North American Trade Aspect…

Read it here.

Britain signs up to be (indefinitely) rule-takers from the European Union

Prime Minister May signed Britain up to have even less sovereignty than it had when a member of the European Union!

"Our political class are detached from us"

Somewhere (probably at Breitbart) I saw that Niguel Farage has been hired by the Trump campaign to help Donald prepare for the next debate. Then I saw this article at The Guardian about Daniel Hannon. Did you know that Farage and Hannon have not spoken since 2014? Yet both were leaders of the Brexit campaign.

Farage accuses Hannon of campaigning for Brexit as though it were an Oxford debate.

I don’t think they have met any real people in their entire lives.” Farage said he didn’t hear much about Hannan’s free-market, open ideals on the doorstep either. “It is another disconnect isn’t it?”

Farage

was just back from the US, where he had addressed a Trump rally in Mississippi, and was smoking on the patio. He had been thinking about the similarities between the core Brexit vote, and Trump’s supporters. “It’s not the have-nothings … They have got something, but they are concerned about the change in society,” he said. “The basic feeling is that something has gone wrong; that we are not in control; that our political class aren’t the same as us, are detached from us.”

Read more here.

Farage addresses the E.U.

The world will never be the same again.

Michael Kennedy writes about Brexit at Chicago Boyz,

...the political left is hysterical at the idea that voters don’t want to be governed by remote elites.

...Who could imagine that people would not want a thousand bureaucrats in Brussels, or for that matter Washington DC, micromanaging their lives ? Well, I know someone.

Donald Trump is a happy guy today, and his timing seems to be excellent. Last week, when the “Remain” side was expected to win, he was told it was a serious mistake to go there.

Trump, on his first trip overseas since he embarked on his White House bid, faced criticism in the US for making what was essentially a business trip at a time when his campaign has been faltering, falling behind Clinton in the polls and in fundraising.

Yes, who can imagine a politician actually conducting business and creating real jobs ?

...There were two referendums on Thursday. The first was on membership of the EU. The second was on the British establishment. Leave won both, and the world will never be the same again.

...Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?

Read more here.

Lessons

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

So the post-Brexit number-crunching is over and it turns out that the decisive support for Britain’s leaving the EU came not from right-wing nationalists but from working-class Labour voters. This offers some lessons for British and European politicians — and for us in America, too.

Read the whole thing here.

They've learned their lesson!

h/t Bookworm Room

Who will decide the terms of Brexit?

I don't pretend to understand British politics. The latest confusion for me is that MP Douglas Carswell and his colleague at Vote Leave, Daniel Hannan, have stated that UKIP leader and long-time Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage would not be invited to the cross-party committee which will negotiate Britain’s exit from the EU.
Read more here.

You mean it's not inevitable that we will continue to be ruled by progressives?

David French writes at National Review,

And so we launch yet another phase in human history, where what’s old — nations pursuing their own interests — is new again. On one end of the European continent sits Russia, a nation that is flexing its muscles and seeking to reclaim its traditional power. On the other end is Britain, a nation that has reclaimed its independence and now faces an uncertain future defining its new relationship with the world.

Across the ocean, America faces its own crisis. Our technocratic elite has constructed its own self-serving system — one that mirrors the very system that Britain rejected yesterday. Our politics are more uncertain and chaotic than at any time in decades. We can’t predict what will happen. But one thing I do know — history never truly had a “side.” Instead, it is the story of action and reaction, and no outcome is inevitable. Britain has acted. The world is set to change, and history can’t tell us what’s next.

Read more here.

Sovereignty, patriotism, rejection of the politics of fear, dawn of a populist uprising

Trump's statement on Brexit

Statement of Donald Trump Regarding British Referendum on E.U. Membership

The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples. They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy. A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense. The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.

Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first. They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people. I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.

Italy, France and the Netherlands may be next

Matthew Holehouse writes at The Telegraph that Italy, France and the Netherlands also have considerable support for leaving the European Union.
Read more here.

When the Americans walk away, Europe tends to fail.

Walter russell Mead writes at The American Interest about the British vote to leave the European Union.

...The vote, and weakening of the West that it heralds, will diminish President Obama’s foreign policy legacy. American policy toward Europe under his leadership has been an abject failure. His most obvious failure, and one that historians will view severely, is his failure to prevent the meltdown of Syria. The millions of desperate refugees fleeing for their lives are much more than a humanitarian disaster; they are a political disaster, and the strain of coping with the refugee flow on top of Europe’s other problems stoked suspicion and fear across the continent and greatly strengthened the power of the Leave campaign in the UK.

But beyond the horrors of Syria, Obama has done less for Europe than any American president since the 1930s. The American response to the euro crisis and its long and bitter aftermath was both shortsighted and feeble. To the extent it did anything, Obama irritated the Germans by critiquing their handling of the crisis while disappointing the debtor countries by an absence of effective support. The United States had great interests at stake when it came to Cameron’s negotiations with the EU; from all one can tell, President Obama spent more time playing golf during those negotiations than he did working to prevent a damaging split between some of our most important partners and allies. Smart American diplomacy would have worked intensely and unremittingly to get a deal between London and its partners that the British people would support, but despite the President’s breathtaking self-confidence, smart diplomacy is not actually part of his skill set.

The British people have the right to choose whether or not to remain in the European Union, and while there will be some in Europe who want to punish them for this choice, the American interest in this matter is clear. We want a strong Britain, a strong Europe, good relations on both sides of the Channel and a trading system that doesn’t put new bureaucratic obstacles in the path of American exports or investment. We do not want bitterness and friction over the break to throw sand in the gears of western political and security cooperation in an increasingly dangerous world. We do not want Europe’s divisions to become Putin’s opportunities. We want Europe to be united, and we want Britain to be Great.

At the same time, the U.S. government needs to do something else that the current administration has unaccountably failed to do over the last seven years: develop a strategy to help save the EU. The European Union is in trouble; the world’s most audacious experiment in international relations is looking both fragile and sclerotic. The British aren’t the only Europeans who think Brussels is a disaster, and the chance that a post-Brexit EU will continue to weaken and fragment is dangerously high. Refugee flows from the Middle East and North Africa are bound to continue. There are few signs of real economic revival in the south. The torpid bureaucracies and dysfunctional political organizations of Brussels can’t deliver real solutions to Europe’s problems, but European nation states have given so many of their powers to the EU that in many cases they lack the ability to act when Brussels fails.

From the 1920s to the present day, American engagement in Europe has been a necessary though not a sufficient condition for European success. And when the Americans walk away, Europe tends to fail. The Americans walked away during the Bush and Obama years, and the consequences of that withdrawal are becoming apparent. If we had engaged earlier and more effectively, Brexit might never have happened. Now that it has, a thoughtful and serious American re-engagement with our friends and allies in Europe is more important than ever.

Read more here.

Simple, isn't it?

At PJ Media Roger L. Simon writes,

News flash: The revolt against elites is real in the UK and America and it's only getting started. Maybe there will always be an England.

In a surprise, Leave won the Brexit referendum on whether to stay in the European Union by an equally surprising amount. British sovereignty won. David Cameron lost. Jeremy Corbyn lost. The EU lost. Bureaucrats lost. Angela Merkel lost. Barack Obama lost. Globalism lost. Authority figures almost everywhere lost. And, most of all, unlimited immigration lost.

So what happened to the vaunted British betting market that is almost invariably correct and was predicting by 80 percent a Remain victory? Or all those recent polls that were tilting Remain?

Answer: Those same elites had convinced each other they would win and therefore convinced the usual suspects—media, pollsters and, sadly, financial markets—that they were right. They were wrong. Watching them now on the BBC they still cannot comprehend what has happened. The peasants have revolted—oh no, oh no. There must be some mistake. Didn't they get the memo? The sky would fall if they left the EU.

Earth to elites: Citizens of truly democratic countries don't want unlimited immigration into their countries by people who couldn't be less interested in democracy. They also don't want to be governed by the rules and regulations of faceless bureaucrats whose not-so-hidden goals are power and riches for themselves and their friends. Simple, isn't it?

...That most elite of presidents, Barack Obama, who opened his morally narcissistic mouth supporting the Remain side and warning the British people, as he is wont to do, that there would be "consequences" if they voted to leave the EU, is in no position to do anything, even if he wanted to. And he doesn't.

Hillary Clinton is so elitist she practically defines the term. She was probably up all night figuring out what to do about the situation. I have a suggestion—move to Brussels.

Meanwhile, Trump should take up the gauntlet for the U.S. and the UK now. Why wait? Act like the president—we could use one. Donald has a natural ally in the leading Leave spokesperson conservative Boris Johnson. The two men are said to be similar and in many ways they are.

Read more here.

A confession

The mainstream media is freaking out about the Brexit vote. Maybe it's time for a confession from me. When my preferred candidate was losing his battle with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, I tuned out Trump supporters like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Roger L. Simon. I even started listening to NPR!

I'm over my tantrum. Today I turned on NPR for what I hope will be one of the last times, during a thunderstorm which was interferring with my AM radio reception. The NPR person started sobbing about the Brexit vote as she rode her bicycle into Munich and talked with her friends. Immediately I laughed uproariously, and changed back to the staticky AM radio program.

Laura Ingraham was excitedly celebrating the Brexit vote. So was Sean Hannity later in the day. And Roger L. Simon has been writing his best stuff ever.

And where was Donald Trump? In London congratulating the people of Britain for their "fantastic" vote! Unlike Barack Obama who scolded them and threatened them prior to the vote, which surely influenced the vote just as happened in 2010 and 2014 in America.

Today, perhaps for the last time in a generation, the British voters have a choice.

Roger Kimball is in Britain observing the debate over "continued subjugation to Brussels versus those keen on reasserting British sovereignty." He writes at PJ Media,

The class division in the debate is fascinating. The establishment, beginning with Prime Minister David Cameron, is firmly, not to say irrationally, in the Remain camp. On his side are the huge corporations, the banks, and all the multinational entities whose lives are barely affected by the morass of intrusive regulation imposed on British business by Brussels. They are large enough to outsource all the compliance requirements, while small or new enterprises stagger under the burden. From the point of view of the establishment, membership in the EU is a good thing if only because it keeps the field clear of rivals.

The Brexiteers are a mixed lot. Their ranks include readers of tabloids like The Daily Mail and The Sun, but also articulate spokesmen for British sovereignty like Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London; Daniel Hannan, a conservative member of the European Parliament; and Michael Gove, the lord chancellor.

...In an interview in The Telegraph this morning, Johnson said that the vote was more important than his political career because at stake was the future of Britain as a free and democratic polity:

"This is an absolute turning point in the story of our country, because ... if we go on with being enmeshed in the EU it will continue to erode our democracy."

...Things didn’t really pick up steam until the Maastricht Treaty came on line at the end of 1993. Then there was the introduction of the single European currency, the euro, in 2002. That was a prelude to a continent-wide Constitution. Unfortunately, those old selfish nationalist interests reared their parochial heads again in the mid-2000s, when a European Constitution was offered to the voters of Europe to approve. Mirabile dictu: voters both in France and the Netherlands declined their ticket to EUtopia. This temporary setback was addressed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008. This was essentially the same document as the European Constitution, but rewritten to be impenetrable to ordinary readers.

And what does the Lisbon Treaty provide for? Leaders who are appointed, not elected; leaders who are accountable to each other, not the people. Rule, that is to say, by self-perpetuating elites who can mostly dispense with the inconvenience of the consent of the governed. The consent of those who govern is so much easier to negotiate.

...At bottom, the European Project is an effort to seize power (“transfer” sounds much nicer though, doesn’t it?) from local and national entities and invest it in a central authority. An early step on this road is what Mr. González-Páramo calls “integration,” i.e., what the Germans in the late 1930s called “Gleichschaltung,” bringing all aspects of life into harmony with certain central dictates.

“Gleichschaltung” is not the only ominous German word one hears about Europe these days. Another is “Anschluss.” Back in 1938, that’s what happened when Germany suddenly absorbed Austria.

...So long as Britain remains tethered to the European Union, Brussels will be able to impose all the regulations it wants via other treaties. Ultimately the debate over Brexit is a debate over sovereignty, which is a fancy word for freedom. Today's vote is historic because on it rests the future freedom of Great Britain.

Will it be absorbed still further into the (more or less) soft bureaucratic totalitarianism of the European Union, gradually extinguishing its common law traditions, or will it reassert its prerogatives of self-rule? My record as a political prognosticator has been ostentatiously poor, yet I venture, with some trepidation, to say that my reading of the tea leaves suggests that the spirit of independence has not been entirely bred out of the British electorate.

There are apparently no exit polls for the referendum, so we won't know until very late tonight whether (to end with another song) Britain will still be able to sing "Rule, Britannia" and its famous refrain "Britons never, never, never will be slaves." That's not the fate that David Cameron, to say nothing of his Continental masters, have in mind, but today, perhaps for the last time in a generation, the British voters have a choice.

You can't be ruled only by your heart!

The big banks have captured the Brussels machine. They love regulation! When Britain joined the E.U. in 1973 the 28 member countries were 36% of the world economy. Last year it was 17% and falling.

Daniel Hannan is certain the Brits will do better outside the E.U., and he is inviting Brits to fire him today. Why? Democracy!

Why isn't Hannan the Prime Minister?

Let the British decide!

At National Review Jim Geraghty discusses the vote that is taking place in Britain in a little more than a week on whether or not to remain in the European Union.

The Obama administration has even resorted to unseemly threats should Great Britain vote to leave the EU. President Barack Obama has warned that Great Britain will have to go to “the back of the queue” on trade negotiations should it vote to leave the EU. And U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has warned the British electorate that “We’re not particularly in the market for free trade agreements with individual countries.”

Truth be told, the United States has several free trade agreements with individual countries. These countries include Israel, South Korea, Morocco and Chile. Froman might find this information useful in his role as trade representative.

...do we have the right to ask our longtime ally to stay in an economic agreement they don’t like, for the sake of our own prosperity? Haven’t our friends earned the right to make their own decisions, even if it is a mistake?

Read more here.