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david m. shribman | commentary

Britain vote a defining moment in year of rebellion

A collection of British newspaper covers in the wake of the Brexit vote.ROB BODMAN/AFP/Getty Images

The early 1860s were years of liberation, in America where a great civil war was fought over slavery and in Russia where millions of serfs won freedom. The late 1920s and 1930s were a time of privation, when joblessness and despair swept the globe. The year 1969 was a time of upheaval, when robust figures like Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon Johnson were chased from office.

And so history almost certainly will record that 2016 was a year of rebellion and populism, when a Manhattan tycoon with an Ivy League degree but little fealty for the conventions of modern politics or politesse was a finalist (at least) for the American presidency and when a Tory prime minister with impeccable Eton and Oxford credentials lost perhaps the biggest public gamble of modern times.

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Regardless of whether Donald J. Trump prevails in November — and right now public opinion polls show a very close race with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton — this year is set to be remembered as one of unusual tumult, with the political establishment reduced to rubble and with all of the expectations and assumptions of American civic life turned upside down. In Britain, the wreckage of the old order is just as stark, the elites just as battered, the political calculus just as disrupted.

In an era of disruption — in commerce, in music, in the news media, even in the taxi business — it should come as no surprise that vast disruptive forces are sweeping through civic life, leaving political parties in upheaval if not in ruin, nor that new names and ideas are busy brooming out the old.

Indeed, the great populist moment and the great populist figure of the age were joined, by caprice of the calendar Friday, when Trump, in a visit to the Turnberry golf resort he owns in Scotland, stood in front of television cameras in his “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and said that Brexit, as the British withdrawal from the European Union is called, was “a great thing.” The British people “stood up for their nation . . . and they took their country back.”

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The phrase may sound familiar. Trump likened his take-down of the status quo to Britain’s, and was certain that his, like theirs, would prevail.

Populism, to be sure, is a slippery concept, often mischievous or misleading. It can arise from the right (the anti-immigrant impulse of then Governor Pete Wilson of California, which in 1994 tipped Hispanics against the GOP in a state where the party was once competitive) or the left (the Populist uprising that produced a new political party in the 1892 election). It can be local (the Upton Sinclair gubernatorial campaign of 1934, which was defeated in California), regional (the 1968 third-party presidential campaign of former governor George C. Wallace of Alabama) or national (the “Share Our Wealth” campaign of Senator Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1930s).

It can be led by figures who are soft-spoken (Democrat Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, who lost 49 states in the 1972 election) or who are fiery and flamboyant (businessman H. Ross Perot, who finished third in the 1992 election). It can occur in nations prone to upheaval (Argentina, where the Perons were principal figures in politics from the 1940s to the 1970s) as well as in nations marked by social peace (such as Canada, where Tommy Douglas and his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan became pioneers in single-payer medicine in the early 1960s).

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What all these movements have in common are platforms and rhetoric claiming to speak for the people rather than big institutions, for the poor or middle class rather than for the wealthy, for a higher, national interest rather than for established special interests.

The world has seen populist rebellion throughout history, sometimes for great good, sometimes for great evil. Once a tidal wave of this sort starts, it is hard to know what it will wash away or where it will stop — as Europe is discovering now and America may learn come Election Day.

The populism of the American West at the end of the 19th century, for example, was the prelude to a burst of creative reform that eventually was steered not by William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat who railed against the bankers and plutocrats of the East, but by Theodore Roosevelt, who went to Harvard and who lived in a 22-room mansion on Long Island. The populism that swept Italy and Germany in the years between the great wars was racist, destructive, and murderous.

There was little question, even before the ballots were counted in the Brexit referendum, that Britain was experiencing a populist moment for the ages, with anti-elitist themes in the air and talk of the people’s will on every tongue.

It was also clear that one slice of British life — the expert class, for want of a better phrase — favored continued British membership in the European Community, while another slice — call it the iconoclast class, for along with blue collar and service industry workers it included established political figures such as former London mayor Boris Johnson, a devout warrior against conventional thinking — just as fervently opposed it.

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The collision between these warring sides was illuminated just before the referendum by opinion pieces in two newspapers, the Telegraph, which generally leans right, and the Guardian, which generally leans left. They offered worldviews that were in conflict, one arguing “we can only reach our full potential, if we take back democratic control over the direction and destiny of our country” and the other imploring, “Vote for a united country that reaches out to the world, and vote against a divided nation that turns inwards.”

The morning after the vote the Daily Mail, the London newspaper that considers itself a populist tabloid, produced what it labeled a “Historic Edition” that carried on its front only the huge headline “Take a Bow, Britain” and these words, in large type: “It was the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant, out-of-touch political class and a contemptuous Brussels elite.”

These divisions are replicated across the West. In France, the insurgency of Front National leader Marine LePen got a boost with the Brexit victory; she surely will press her anti-immigrant views as next year’s presidential election nears. In Britain, the vote created new divisions, scrambling the political order, adding urgency and perhaps potency to Scottish nationalism, which may come to a new referendum vote sooner rather than later.

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The effect on the United States is yet unknown, but already 2016 is etched in history as a campaign year of unusual tension and upended expectations.

Long before Britons lined up for Leave or Remain, Americans divided over the rise of Trump, who criticized his rivals with a venom seldom seen in domestic politics, who expressed views on race seldom shared in public, and who defied the establishment of a political party that itself was a symbol of the national establishment. He belittled the Bushes, the royal family of the Republican Party, even as he ridiculed the very party leaders who control the legislative branch and who would, in a Trump administration, hold in their hands the destiny of the Trump agenda.

And yet there is little question that Trump will use the British vote as a bludgeon against Clinton, who herself has just completed a battle against a populist insurgency in her own party. The campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was based on anti-establishment forces as adamant as those that propelled Trump to victory, and the hurricane-force winds of the Sanders campaign, which blew away Clinton’s aura of invincibility, pushed the former New York senator to adjust her views on international trade agreements and to adopt an anti-business profile at odds with her recent history and perhaps her inclinations.

Campaigning as a populist is easy; governing as one is far more difficult. Trump has mastered the former. Clinton will argue that the latter is incompatible with American tradition. Thus the great populist moment is itself about to be transformed, into a truly significant November confrontation — an epic test of character, and of ideas and institutions.


David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, can be reached at dshribman@post-gazette.com.