I cannot stand how the ability to discourse has evaporated from the public square. The elites want to dialogue, but not really. They want to start from the premise that if you disagree with them you are an irrational bigoted racist -- and that's just for starters! Read the elite perspective in the SFGate today. It's sickening! TM
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This is what happens when you enflame and provoke to the point of vicious irrationality. This is what happens when you make vague and heartless, crass, openly racist, fear-based, hyper-jingoistic promises that are impossible to deliver and will actually only make things far, far worse. And quickly.
It took but a single vote. And the world swoons, shudders, cringes deep in the heart as the worst, darkest, most anxious impulses of humankind surge forth and tear an entire nation off the map, and hurl it to the floor, laughing madly.

Does that sound extreme? Hardly. Brexit, as we are right now seeing in terrifyingly real time, is what happens when hate wins, when vast swaths of anxious older people and the working classes are convinced immigrants are a dire threat and they themselves are victims of oppression and numb disenfranchisement, when flames of xenophobia and neo-nationalism engulf a country and burn it to the ground in a single evening. It’s fear in the service of crass emotional manipulation. And when hate wins, everyone loses.

Heartbreaking notes, letters of stunned sadness, essays of dejected disbelief are pouring forth. As Hope Whitmore, a “young-ish” writer living in Scotland, put it in her touching piece for the Awl:

The EU was created after the Second World War to make sure that we looked after each other; that we were kinder, better; so that we didn’t kill each other in massive numbers. We would offer one another haven, keep one another safe, and together we would be kind to the rest of the world.


It’s a stunning and heartbreaking thing, across the board. The United Kingdom is united no more. The old just completely screwed over the young. World financial markets are reeling as everyone realizes London will no longer be a major financial hub, decades-old partnerships are dissolving in an instant, trade maps will have to be massively redrawn as England just willingly isolated itself like no first-world nation in modern history.

But while financial markets are flailing, trying to figure out how to absorb Britain’s destabilizing decision, and as as one really knows what’s going to happen or how it will all shake out for the EU in the longer term, there is perhaps a far more important question, one about how the already anxious nations of the world will absorb this sudden explosion of fear and hate, the shrapnel of which is bloodying the entire globe.

Right now, champions of anti-immigration, of racism, of harshly divisive nationalism are all stampeding forth to shove newly invigorated agendas of their own down the planet’s throat. How will we respond?

America already has Trump, the most poisonous voice of fear and bigotry the GOP could possibly vomit forth in this generation. While Brexit isn’t exactly an example of what will happen if Trump were to win the presidency – that would be far, far worse – it is very much an example of just how destructive are the demons of hate and xenophobia Trump loves to provoke in his exceedingly choleric, paranoid voter base. Trump is essentially taunting the world: “You think Brexit is bad? Just wait until I get my tiny orange hands around the throat of America.”

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http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/06/2...autionary-tale/

A most excellent pro-Brexit presentation from a Brit...