Economic insecurity is core of Brexit vote

By Georgie Anne Geyer

In these days after British citizens astonished the world - and themselves - by voting to leave the European Union, there have, not surprisingly, been a considerable number of comparisons made between the United Kingdom and American situations.

Brexit supporters Donald Trump and outgoing London Mayor Boris Johnson both have notably shaggy, unruly hair - and blond! Natives of both nations bask in the memories of greatness they believe has been lost after years of stultifying multiculturalism and globalization.

"Ahhh," say the Brexit Brits, "for the days when the sun never set on the British Empire." Which The Donald unceasingly parallels, "We'll make America GREAT again!"

But the greatest similarity between the world's two English-speaking giants - who have between them given most of the globe its legal systems, schools and education, freedom for women and methods for organizing societies - is the current malaise in both countries. The two lands are remarkably similar in the increasing poverty of the working and middle classes, compared to the unprecedented wealth of the upper class.

As Philip Stephens wrote before the vote in a major piece in The Financial Times on the British part of the problem: "The temper of the times - a national mood that since the 2008 financial crash has grown disgruntled with austerity and ever less trusting in the political establishment and business elites - also favors those who want to leave.

"Add to the mix stagnant household incomes, the excesses of the 1 percent and the economic and social disruption caused by immigration, and the Brexiters have fertile ground for their populism. The Leave campaign is as much about harnessing popular rage against the economic insecurities and open borders of globalization as about defenestrating the Eurocrats of Brussels."

Or, as a White House study by the Council of Economic Advisers reported just before the Brexit referendum, in America, working-age males have been sitting on the sidelines with regard to work in the greatest numbers for ages. Most are men with lower levels of education, and one major root of the problem seems to be a loss of economic opportunity for low-skilled labor.

Among males aged 25 to 54, labor force participation has fallen from 98 percent in 1954 to 88 percent today. The rate is even worse for men with only a high school diploma.

To these realities, not to speak of the large numbers of immigrants who citizens feel take their places in the workforce, analysts have mostly existential answers: America and Great Britain are feeling "isolated or alienated." Donald Trump's "great wall" at the Mexican border is the brother to Boris Johnson's Brexit.

"The specter of a breakup is haunting Europe," Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, told center-right political party leaders in Europe weeks before Brexit, showing the profound concern among leaders of this great experiment in European unity. This was, and is, after all, the experiment that was to end war on the continent forever by establishing such deep and profound economic ties that war would become too unthinkably expensive.

But perhaps the best - certainly the most practical - of the newspaper analyses came from another prominent Financial Times writer, Edward Luce, who wrote: "Today blue-collar whites on both sides of the Atlantic are speaking in the same idiom. They both yearn for the certainties of a lost age."

Luce has hit the comparison on its head. The problem today is that globalization sounds beautiful - the concept that markets should be entirely open among all nations, without taxes or tariffs on imports or exports. The idea, put forth in a thousand think tanks and postgraduate classrooms, foresaw a world open, fair and free. But that wasn't the way it turned out.

I remember sitting through a number of think-tank sessions here, mostly in the '80s and '90s, listening to experts talking about globalization with the most rosy of expectations. But no one ever mentioned what would happen to the steelworker in Chicago or Gary, or the ironworker in northern Michigan or the furniture factories in the Carolinas.

I recall asking once what would happen to these people when, as was inevitable, their plants moved to Mexico, or China, or Sri Lanka for cheaper labor. The speakers brushed me off, as if I were a tiresome bore. "Why, they would simply join the new service economy," they said.

I thought of invoking my best (or worst?) sassy and snippy self and suggesting that surely it would be easy for a steelworker to be a concierge at the Ritz, but the session had moved on without me.

And the world has moved on, but not very well. We should have trained American workers for this new age; we should have controlled immigration so American workers did not feel their lives were growing so out of control. We should have limited immigration to a reasonable, and legal, level so Americans did not feel they were losing themselves.

In the end, this new era is characterized by the question, "Who are we?" It is time we take pause in the midst of all this self-created and disturbing change and seriously consider that question.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal