Posted on 10/11/2016 4:04:29 PM PDT by Lorianne
Shortly after the EU referendum, several thousand young people marched through London demanding a rerun. I happened to be sitting next to three of them on a train as I travelled into the capital that morning. They evidently recognised me right away as an Evil Tory Leaver, but we were past Clapham Junction before one of them plucked up the courage to talk to me.
"Are you Daniel Hannan? I just wanted to say that what you've done is terrible. We're not a racist country. You've taken away our future."
"Is that so? Out of interest, can you tell me who the President of the European Commission is?"
"No. What's that got to do with it?"
"Can you name a single European Commissioner, come to that? Do you know what our budget contribution will be this year? Or what the difference is between a Directive and a Regulation?"
She was affronted by the questions. So were her two friends with their "I [heart] EU" placards. They weren't interested in details. For them, it was about values. Are you a decent, internationalist, compassionate person? Or are you a selfish bigot?
Let's leave aside the fact that no one would ever vote on any ballot paper for a "selfish bigot" option. Their determination to approach the issue in terms of character, rather than cost-benefit, explains why they were so upset – and why, even now, some Remain voters struggle to accept the outcome.
In my experience, the 48% who voted Remain fall into two categories. There are those who were making a judgement as to where Britain's best options lay. They could see that the is EU flawed. They were well aware of the corruption, the lack of democracy, the slow growth. But they took the view that, on balance, the disruption of leaving would outweigh the gains. These people, by and large, now want to make a success of things, and are keen to maximise our opportunities.
Then there were those like my companions on South West Trains, for whom the issue was not financial but somehow moral. For them, the EU wasn't the grubby and self-interested body that exists in reality; rather, it was a symbol of something better and purer, an embodiment of the dream of peace among nations. They never heard, because they never wanted to hear, the democratic or economic arguments against membership. As far as they were concerned, the only possible reason for voting Leave was chauvinism.
You can see why they were shocked on the morning of 24 June. Having so defined the question in their own minds, they must have been horrified to think that 52% of their fellow-countrymen were xenophobes. It explains why, since the vote, they have been reluctant to engage in any kind of debate about how to get the best deal. How, after all, can you debate with a bunch of racist numbskulls? Better just to hope for some economic catastrophe that might shock people into reversing their votes at a second referendum.
snip
For them, it was all about virtue signalling.
Should have followed up with "And do you know who gets nicked for that payment? The three of you, that is who. It's your tax money, we send it to them as a "contribution" and you three get nothing in return.
About 17 billion every year and we get back about 1/3."
.
They were feeling with their hearts rather than thinking with their brains. Fortunately for Great Britain, enough Brits were thinking when it came to Brexit.
This is a universal liberal tactic.
Liberal branding = smart, rational, tolerant, good, caring, moral
This lets them smear all conservatives as stupid, irrational (crazy), bigoted, bad, evil.
The whole “compassion/anti-bigot” thing is a pose to hide self-interest. Young voters tended to believe EU membership enhanced their ability to flit about Europe, theoretically work anywhere in the EU, etc. Older, more settled, employed taxpayers received little benefit from that, and were weary of bearing the costs of mass immigration and the crushing effects of the EU’s intrusive bureaucratic rules on Britain’s own economy. Pretending that equates to bigotry is the Left’s typical gambit.
I’ve noticed that too. But you’ve summarized it better than I could.
I was actually paraphrasing Dennis Prager.
His book “Still the Best Hope” is an excellent study in the war of the world views we’re in, liberal secular versus Judeo-Christian American versus Islamo-fascist. And right now, the liberals ally with the Muslims because they are convinced conservative Christians are Taliban in waiting, while ignoring Islam’s historic and modern tendency to spawn theocratic states.
“Still the Best Hope” by Dennis Prager, a Book Review
http://hubpages.com/literature/Review-of-the-Book-Still-the-Best-Hope-by-Dennis-Prager
Interesting. If they keep it up they’re going to virtue-signal themselves into a Lebanon.
Mindless Outer-Party Drones don’t know they are Mindless Outer-Party Drones.
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