Ed Luce: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a related question on the iPad. I’m rewording a bit. Is it the case that elites have so used the judiciary and administrative law, in the case of the UK, through the European Union, that actually Brexit and Trump are simply democratic backlashes wanting to take back for democracy powers that had taken away from the democratic will of the people, and it had to get to the point of Brexit and Trump for that actually to be reversed? Yeah, that would be your “history will look back on this as a liberal moment” scenario, that this is a very violent sort of counterreaction to the growing internationalization of law, to the increasingly widened field of stuff that’s off‑limits to democratic decision making, which of course, includes trade, regulation, international. If you’re in Europe, it includes all these things. If this is simply a correction where we reject Davos, we reject the sort of “elites run the world,” and decide all the big economic stuff, and we just stick with identity politics, then this could be a liberal moment. I think it’s a very good question. I suspect, though, you don’t just have these little conniptions that then fade away. There are consequences to these connections, and I fear that Trumpism, even if he lost in 2020, is going to leave a deeply disruptive mark ‑‑ in the pejorative sense of disruptive ‑‑ mark on American democracy and on the reputation of American democracy and American leadership around the world. As I’ve said before on Brexit, we’re about to sign up as the same option to a world where foreigners decide our regulations, our trade deals, our products standards, and all, except we don’t a say over it. If that’s rational, go figure. Next question.…

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