Originally Posted by Mariesam:
“Media types like O'Brien still don't get it.....it is the 'Elites' that have had the policies that have mass uncontrolled immigration, which in effect has created the division...if we allowed people to come in who we needed the skills of and did so in a way which wouldn't affect our health services which are constantly stretched to the limit, and housing and schools etc, it would be more acceptable to people because the immigration is manageable..
....its the 'elites' that have allowed this to happen and why people are voting against those 'elites' and media types like James O'Brien still don't get it or don't want to (its easy to call people racist or thick - which he loves to do), people are not in the vast majority against some form of immigration, they are against mass uncontrolled immigration, which affects us all and the services in which we all rely.”
I think the current malcontent goes far deeper than uncontrolled immigration, racism or misogyny or whatever hip label is currently used to describe it. That's what JOB does not get, even as he keeps holding onto that as the reason for its presence. (Racism had no more disappeared when Obama came into power in the US than it did prior to Brexit - it is a ridiculous rose-tinted fallacy to believe, argue or say anything to the contrary.) To explain away the malcontent as an anger towards uncontrolled immigration or Johnny Foreigner (whether it is JOB using it to bash people's head with it or people calling in to offer it as a reason) is a lot easier than make sense of it on a far deeper way that not just expose a profound and complex psychological disconnect that has occured between the people and the political, social, cultural (including the media) and economic institutions that proport to serve them. It is that kind of discourse and thinking that has led us to current discontent: the simplifying, dumbiing down of complex matters into easily digestible soundbites. The disconnect is deep, multi-facted and fragmentary, the main narrative thread being that vast sways of people are now clearly fed-up with or getting thoroughly sick of the useless manner in which they are being or have been governed, not just politically but economically, financially, culturally and socially.
Brexit and Trump were years in the making. None of what is happening should no longer come as a surprise. Even then Brexit and Trump may not assuage the malcontent: I think they may be just symptoms of a deeper malaise currently taking place in western democracies. On their own, they may not be as significant as people are making out - they may be just isolated to those countries; they may not even offer/signify the profound change we think or believe they represent. But that does not mean that going back to the status quo (or politics of old) is the answer: remaining in an unwieldly EU so reluctant, stubborn and slow to reform itself and respond to crises was never going to be the answer; leaving the EU may not offer solutions either. Not that Trump offers the solutions (he may/may not); but certainly and more significantly Clinton did not and does not (Sanders' campaign showed that for many it had little to do with immigration: millennials didn't come out to vote for Clinton. African-American also didn't come out in large numbers to vote for Clinton either. The Democrats have problems of them own.) The way people have responded/are responding to these two voting results may even be senselessly hyperbolic. More evidence, such as what will happen in the French and German elections, may be needed to be sure that something significant is happening in the West. After Clinton, I'm not as certain Merkel is safe. But even if she was, hers is a politics and chancellorship that will be sorely tested. What is uncertain is the shape things are taking and where it is leading us and how to deal with it - these things take time to clearly make themselves known.
The next election/referendum to look out for (and one that may have probable significance for the EU) is the Italian referendum on constitutional reform in Dec. Even that may prove insiginficant. Personally I still think there are more social, financial and economic crises yet to come, with the EU will be shaken and sorely tested by them. And whatever it is that is making the Western electorate break out in p**sed-off rebellion, I don't think the media (JOB included) and politicians know (for all their intellectualising) how to make sense of it and give a coherent narrative, other than to offer nothing but useless shallow patisan soundbites, labels, slogans and (personal) mud-slinging.
