Brexit and Right Wing Populism in General

One of the issues that makes Brexit - and the populist/free trade dilemma in general -  so painful is the sheer amount of connections; highly clustered nerve endings essentially. In an advanced economy, there are so many wants, which are conditioned both by habituation and the constant driving interests of manufacturers and producers. The global economy is so highly interconnected, and many of these wants are delivered through networks that span many nations. The global supply chain is profoundly integrated at this point.

What is so painful about the Brexit break? What is so traumatic about the rise of right wing populism in general? The many economic connections, forged through force and deceit over the last couple of decades, must now be renegotiated and reimplemented by societies atomized by the very economic connections they have fostered, complex societies completely dependent on external inputs coming from all directions.

The populism would work - in a practical sense, there are so many other issues here - if everyone was able to simultaneously forego a large portion of resources, which would be initially traumatic, but could clear the way for the establishment of a new governing body. However this would require a more even distribution of resources within and without the dominant empires, all of which are locked in a mimetic struggle for resource control and border security, a dynamic which of course requires the diversion of resources into their bodies.

The issue is that the more active and politically efficacious strains of populism at the moment are tightly coupled with xenophobic nationalism, a recipe for disaster in an interconnected global market. The wealth has been unevenly graduated along various identity and class gradients, and those gradients seek to persist and sustain themselves along the lines of hierarchy and privilege, so that any change in the flow of resources must necessarily cause social distrust and political discord.

Of course many populists don't intend to forego these resources anyway. The right wing populists that are driving both the Brexit and Trump political movements desire the same amount of resources and social domination they were once accustomed to, and feel that they are in the process of losing objects of comfort and their general standing. Without a doubt, there are many impoverished individuals that are genuinely suffering and require relief, but they've yoked their salvation to a force that will further pulverize them in the end, as it always has.

Another dimension to right wing populism is that it can be seen as a simplifying mechanism. Our society is far too complex to administer sweeping changes in the face of crisis, with the hope that those changes will correctly and accurately fix the multitude of pathologies that make up the regular function of the global market. The time frame will not allow for a careful untangling of social and economic pathologies. What is required is decisive force and simplified decisions, which of course are resting in the hands of an arrogant and entitled tribe of imperial myth worshipers.

So you see Trump pushing both tariffs and market liberalization, a hybrid of ideologically simplified toolsets which symbolize strength and vitality in the classical and neoclassical liberal imagination. So we must go back to what we had before and protect national industries by imposing tariffs on foreign competing products, without restructuring the economic entities that the tariffs are applied to. So of course various mega corporations are actually hurt when the cost of their foreign-sourced raw materials and manufacturing inputs go up, and they must pass the costs on to their customers.

At the same time, industries like the Telecom industry are further liberalized, without additional measures to break up industry monopolies. We can watch as net neutrality begins to disappear, and the oligarchs that control the pipes are now freed to eat the lunch of competing oligarchs which use the pipes, and then individual Internet users themselves.

What we are left with is not a systematic restructuring and progression toward harmony, but a constant antagonism against all that already exists, which has been left in place.