Down the rabbit hole

After a few days reflection, I find myself changing my mind about the larger implications of Brexit. At first I had thought it boded ill for our own nation. After all, if Great Britain can manage to vote itself down from a major world power to a shrunken frightened little child, then the same could happen here.

But now that the charlatans behind that bizarre maneuver have had a chance to show their true colors, I am heartened. The mythical three hundred and fifty million pounds paid weekly to the E.U. has vanished in a puff of rhetorical smoke, just as the promised greater investment in British healthcare was revealed to be nothing but empty talk.

After the sad spectacle of Brexit, I had worried that people in the U.S. might also be taken in by a narcissistic no-nothing opportunist who doesn’t know the first thing about how government actually works. But now I realize that we have the example of Brexit to show just how embarrassing it is for a country to be taken in by nonsense talk from fools and knaves.

The U.S. now has a clear working example of what happens when racist isolationist opportunists steal the microphone. At the end of the day, we Americans tend to be a fairly pragmatic people, with a strong instinct for self-preservation.

Which is why I’m newly hopeful that we on this side of the Atlantic will not follow Great Britain down the rabbit hole of small minded and racist fear mongering. Because that’s how a great nation destroys itself.