Anthony Barnett - The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump

Anthony Barnett was the first Director of Charter 88, the campaign for constitutional reform, 198895. He co-founded openDemocracy in 2001, was its first Editor and writes regularly for it. He co-directed the Convention on Modern Liberty in 2009. He is a Londoner.

ALSO BY ANTHONY BARNETT

Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War

Soviet Freedom

Power and the Throne (editor)

This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution

The Athenian Option (with Peter Carty)

Blimey, it could be Brexit!

England, 1830

These vague allusions to a countrys wrongs,

Where one says Ay and others answer No

In contradiction from a thousand tongues,

Till like to prison-cells her freedoms grow

Becobwebbed with these oft-repeated songs

Of peace and plenty in the midst of woe

And is it thus they mock her year by year,

Telling poor truth unto her face she lies,

Declaiming of her wealth with gibe severe,

So long as taxes drain their wished supplies?

And will these jailers rivet every chain

Anew, yet loudest in their mockery be,

To damn her into madness with disdain,

Forging new bonds and bidding her be free?

John Clare

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If you are British, and especially if you are young and British, your right to move, live, love, work, research and settle in another country of our continent, may be taken away from you by Brexit, should it be implemented. The likelihood that the UK will leave the EU strikes at your freedom to be the European that you are. Equally important, it removes your ability to welcome Europeans to come and live with you. Instead they, and the millions of Europeans who have helped to make our country so much a better place to live in, face the threat of expulsion. Grief over the loss of a shared European future hurts the young especially, but not only. Scientists, artists, scholars, medical researchers, business people and engineers all those engaged in creative work and cultures embedded in international collaboration that the EU has assisted so hugely are torn inwardly as the UK is ripped out of their European networks.

If you are American, your right to exist without fear is in jeopardy. In a country of immigrants, to be an immigrant is to live in dread, if not for oneself, for relatives or visitors. Welcome to what it is like to be black, is one riposte, revealing what is at stake when contempt for due process, civilised government, honesty and every liberty except wealth rules in the White House. It was becoming possible to love, live and share life with others without regard to the colour of their skin, nationality or religion. This has been put at risk by the election of Trump.

Perhaps the expectations were unspoken and it was only after his election and the referendum that something precious was lost, that is akin to bereavement. In addition to personal fears a dangerous political poison is in the air. Many were elated at the prospect of Trump and Brexit giving them voice and self-government, but in Washington and London authoritarian centralisers are bending the state to their will. These horrible developments are separated by the Atlantic but joined by more than the coincidence of taking place within months of each other.

Since the end of the Second World War, shared human rights have transformed the meaning of individual liberty across Europe. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany behind the wall that literally divided her country. No one could cross it without permission, or they put their life at risk. For her in an extreme form, but also for hundreds of millions of us, freedom to move across the EU means the end to a kind of imprisonment. Even if most of us decide to stay in our own country, this becomes a chosen destination when we have the right not just to travel but also to stay, temporarily or permanently, in any of the extraordinary range of settlements across the 4.3 million square kilometres of the Union. Suddenly a new wall has been thrown up across part of Europe. In 2017 the barrier of Brexit is just a declaration, all the more alarming because its meaning and consequences are still unclear.

The wall that Trump promises between the USA and Mexico is an expensive joke. Drugs fly. A significant barrier, often in fact a wall, exists. Millions of illegal immigrants are already caught and deported back. What is no joke is the symbolism of his proclamation: an internal wall is being driven into the heart of the country, separating Americans from one another. Legally nothing has so far been changed by Trumps election. In practice the dark history of vigilantism that harks back to the lynch mobs of the Jim Crow era has been fanned back into life. Instead of violent prejudice becoming marginalised and dying out, for the first time the Ku Klux Klan celebrated the election of a new president. A terrible permission has been let loose across the United States.

The paralegal enforcement of discrimination never stopped in the USA, but now we are witnessing its resurgence expressed by the intensification of widespread voter suppression. Because this is systematic it defines actually existing America. The elimination of blacks and other minorities as well as poor whites from the electoral roll in key states may even technically have won the election for Trump. Especially shocking is the acceptance of such suppression and its purposive racial bias a collusion that makes the whole country complicit. Millions of Americans are not registered to vote even though they are entitled to, and millions are in effect prevented from doing so.

The United States barely qualifies as a democracy in this respect. No one with an interest in the election of the most powerful person on the planet could have failed to register the importance of the Second Amendment in the presidential contest. It enshrines the right of American citizens to bear arms. Trump positioned himself as its defender and Clinton, falsely, as someone who would undo it, when she demanded fewer weapons of mass slaughter be sold to the mentally unsound. The National Rifle Association became Trumps number one lobbyist to defend the Second Amendment. Meanwhile the entire political system is in breach of the Fifteenth Amendment, about which nothing is heard: