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Make Britain Great Again UK Hat Cap Brexit 2016

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Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Wednesday that Johnson's pledge to secure a new Brexit deal was "not in the real world". Lilla’s critics have accused him of urging a return to the bad old Mad Men days when western democracies were dominated by white middle-class males, and racism, sexism and general intolerance were the rule of the day, such evils being the necessary price of national unity, in the US at least. However, as anyone will realise who read the piece carefully, this is not what Lilla thinks, and is not what he was recommending. At its simplest level, the article merely observed that to emphasise and celebrate diversity to a level that damages social cohesion is not only foolhardy, but dangerous, and would end in disaster for liberalism – the disaster philosopher Richard Rorty predicted a decade ago, and which has now come to pass. It is the most contentious part of the deal for British lawmakers, who fear it could ultimately slice Northern Ireland off from the rest of the United Kingdom. If Britain does leave the EU, it may suffer all kinds of negative consequences. But the country’s political system will in no way be under threat.

If EU leaders refuse to play ball and Johnson moves toward a no-deal Brexit, some of the lawmakers in his own Conservative party have threatened to thwart what they see as a blind leap into economic chaos. As suggested by his rather combative speech, we have to be ready for a situation where he gives priority to the planning for 'no deal', partly to heap pressure on the unity of the EU27," Barnier said in a note sent to EU member states. In style or substance, of course, Margaret Thatcher is nothing like Donald Trump. Trump proudly breaks all rules of good behavior; Thatcher insisted on the civilizing power of social convention. Trump is an ideological iconoclast, always willing to follow the lowest instincts of his supporters whether they lead him to the left or the proto-fascist right; Thatcher was a committed conservative who aimed, first and foremost, to advance her principles. To do this, reform is essential in the way our country is run and managed, so it works properly for the people. In many areas, just the application of basic common sense would be a good start! While repeatedly refusing to countenance rewriting the Withdrawal Agreement, the EU has said it could change the non-binding "Political Declaration" on future ties that is part of the divorce deal.

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Among the many populist strands, the one that will receive more than its usual share of attention in the next few months stands in a direct line of descent from Thatcher. Increasingly hostile to the European Union over the course of her career, she infamously concluded upon leaving office that, “they’re a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know. Weak, feeble.” In a referendum on EU membership in June, her countrymen now have the option of severing ties with that weak lot. To judge by early opinion polls, many of them are tempted. But, for all of their differences, it is no mere historical oddity that they wound up with much the same slogan. In fact, it rather neatly encapsulates a crucial trait that unites many right-wing politicians who are otherwise dissimilar: They not only share the nationalist belief that their country is marked for greatness—but also the visceral fear that it is under threat both from internal traitors and external enemies. The most obvious culprit often lies outside the country. So it is only logical that Trump blames America’s economic problems on China and other countries. Nor should it be surprising that he preys on people’s fears by claiming that the United States is being overrun by dangerous rapists (Mexicans) and terrorists (Muslims). European populists see their enemies elsewhere, and tend to express their bile in a rather more circumspect manner. But their rhetoric has the same underlying logic. Like Trump, Le Pen and Farage believe that it must be the fault of outsiders—of Muslim moochers, Polish plumbers, or Brussels bureaucrats—if ordinary people feel that their incomes are stagnating and their identity is threatened.

Reform our Energy Strategy: We all care about the environment and want cleaner air, and we can do this in a strategic, affordable way. Yet the Westminster Net Zero plan is making us all net poorer whilst creating more emissions overall as it outsources them overseas. It is therefore net stupid. It is adding huge extra costs to us all as consumers and to our businesses. This will send hundreds of thousands of British jobs to China and elsewhere. Our energy plan will use our own energy treasure under our feet, and create thousands of British jobs, by making our industries competitive again. It will save consumers considerable amounts of money on their bills every year. We would also nationalise 50% of key utility companies to stop consumers being ripped off with the other 50% being owned by British pension funds for British pensioners. There is only one problem with talking up the role of outside enemies: If they should seem too powerful, the promise of easy deliverance would begin to ring hollow. To preserve the idea that it would be easy for somebody with the right intentions to make all the difference, populists thus need to supplement their fear-mongering about external enemies with wrath at internal traitors who have supposedly enabled them. This, of course, is the political establishment. People in the capital, populists of all stripes argue, are either in it for themselves, or they are in cahoots with the nation’s enemies. Establishment politicians have a misguided fetish for diversity. Or they have naively bought into the European ideal. Or—simplest explanation of all—they are secretly Muslim. The introduction, which shows Lilla at his scintillating best, points to the fact that today’s university libraries will offer the reader hundreds of books in numerous languages on the topic of revolution, whereas “on the idea of reaction you will be hard put to find a dozen”. This is an odd state of affairs, since it is not any revolutionary force that has created the blood-boltered world of today, but the force of reaction, whether in Putin’s Russia, in Trump’s would-be-great-again America, or in the festering deserts of Iraq and Syria. This essay originally appeared as part of Will the U.K. Divorce Europe Yet Again? , a project of Zócalo Public Square. The Euroskepticism that has animated the “Leave” campaign is, in some ways, the least pernicious form of populism. Its declared enemies are comfortable bureaucrats in Brussels, not the Syrian refugees who are moving in next door. Nor is the solution they seek the stuff of nightmares. Instead of dismantling civil rights and independent courts—as Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, and as Jarosław Kaczyński is now doing in Poland—those advocating for the so-called “Brexit” seek to leave a supranational organization that, for all of its many achievements, really does have a significant democratic deficit. Though the European ideal is much more noble, and rather less naïve, than critics give it credit for, any clear-eyed observer must concede that the predominance of bureaucrats has effectively insulated the EU from the political preferences of ordinary Europeans.This begs an obvious question. If the political problems of our time are so easy to fix, why do they persist? Since the populists are unwilling to brook the idea that the real world might be complicated—that solutions might be elusive even for people with good intentions—they need somebody to blame. And blame they do. His bet is that the threat of the economic disruption that a "no-deal" Brexit would cause will convince the EU's biggest powers - Germany and France - to agree to revise the divorce deal that May agreed last November but failed to get ratified. In the section Currents, Lilla considers various manifestations of reaction, such as what we might call the “neo-Catholic” Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, the pretensions and conclusions of which he delicately fillets, and the strange, ongoing rehabilitation of St Paul among thinkers on the far left and the far right, including Hitler’s jurist Schmitt on one side, and the French Maoist Alain Badiou on the other. Badiou, Lilla writes with fine irony, is one among a number of victims of “a very old political romanticism that longs … to break free and feel the hot pulse of passion, to upset the petty laws and conventions that crush the human spirit and pay the rent”. However, their patron saint, he insists, is not St Paul, but Emma Bovary, who read too many romances, and dreamed too many deluding dreams. Like John Gray, Lilla sees clear to the heart of modern-day millenarianism and finds there the old, old story of longing for a lost golden age and the expectation of a brave new world to come. He recalls the immense influence Oswald Spengler’s The Decline and Fall of the West had on philosophers and politicians after the first world war, but he also finds strong traces of “declinist” thinking in modern-day self-styled revolutionaries such as “apocalyptic deep ecologists, anti-globalists and anti-growth activists”. Nor is it just on the left that Spengler’s legacy is still alive: it is also there “in the writings of radical political Islamists, whose story of the secular west’s decline into decadence, and the inevitable triumph of a vigorous, renewed religion, has European fingerprints all over it”. However, the publication of the book itself has been overshadowed by the controversy provoked by an article Lilla wrote in the New York Times last month, following Donald’s Trump’s election, which argued that in recent years “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing”. This seemed a reasonable observation, especially to those of us who were in the US in the months before and after the election and witnessed, and felt, the levels of rage and resentment among many millions of voters – Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” – who felt themselves excluded by the liberal, well-heeled and, it should be emphasised, multiracial middle class, and plumped for Trump whether they liked him or not.

Reform our Institutions: Major change is needed to the bodies that impact our lives — the unelected cronyism of the House of Lords, the unaccountable civil service and the bloated BBC. Reform is essential to our voting system so it is fairer and more representative; the two-party system embeds the status quo and prevents real change. In keeping with the fashion of the times, the future Mrs. Thatcher wore a hat through much of her failed first campaign—though she does not seem to have had the wherewithal to emblazon it with her catchy slogan. That particular piece of showmanship was left to another unlikely political upstart, whose infamous slogan is eerily similar, and who also believes that an incompetent government is to blame for leaving his country weak, economically stagnant, and overly hesitant to use its might: Donald J. Trump. As a nation we have so much potential, so much that we should be optimistic about. We can make Britain great again. In the winter of 1950, a young parliamentary candidate by the name of Margaret H. Roberts made a big promise to her would-be voters. Her country, the 24-year old political newcomer complained, had become weak: its economy was in tatters, its government too hesitant to exercise its might abroad. After years of decline and incompetence under a Labor government, it was “ time to make Great Britain great again.” Lilla, one of our most incisive public intellectuals, has now produced another volume of essays, on what Lionel Trilling called, somewhat grandiloquently, the “bloody crossroads” where literature and politics meet. It is a timely and illuminating study of political reaction, historical and contemporary, and its devastating effects on the present-day world and, most likely, the world of the foreseeable future as well.

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