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Let's start off (unless someone fires a link earlier) with this one: Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics
The article goes on to show that previous generations in UK and US have indeed formed a remarkably similar pattern of starting out voting for left side main parties (Labour/Dems) and moving rightwards (to Tories/GOP) with age, but Millennials aren't doing that, and are if anything sticking firmer with the left side parties with age.
When it comes to Britain, in particular, I suspect that Brexit may have a lot to do with this. For Millennial Remainers, in particular, the whole thing has evidently been a horrorshow; from following various FBPE types and hearing from friends who have lived in the UK, the thinking basically goes; for your entire life your country has belonged to the EU, which has given you ease of travel and has seemed to be without issues, and suddenly a bunch of (mostly) Tory-voting boomers decides to take the country out of the Union, and no-one still has managed to explained to you exactly how Britain has benefitted from this, or what fundamental reason for this there even was for the whole Brexit, beyond "Well, it's not as big a disaster as Remoaners are claiming when you look into it" (or, possibly, "Fuck you, Remoaner! Elitist! Take back control!")
With the Tories then increasingly becoming the party of Brexit, it would be little wonder if such types would continue to give Tories the wide berth, even if they start getting to the age where traditionally Tories start becoming more and more attractive, as an option.
Of course, US and UK are a bit expectional in how strongly there's an age-related left/right split with young voting for left parties and the old voting for right parties. It would be interesting to see if this replicates in other countries where Millennials and younger voters have recently been trending rightwards and where centre-left parties have for some time been more popular among the old than the youth, like Sweden. (Indeed, I already saw on Twitter that the effect is not replicating in non-Anglophone West.)
I would say that it's less been "evidently" a horrowshow and it's more that they've been told that it's a horrowshow. Anyone who wasn't plugged into news media would probably struggle to articulate any way in which Brexit has actually materially affected their life. Marginally more waiting times at airports to go on holiday?
Freedom of movement is almost never used in practice, indeed 55% of brits never move very far away from where they're born;
https://www.showhouse.co.uk/news/55-of-brits-live-within-15-miles-of-hometown/
Most of my investigations of people who whine about the ending of FoM reveal that they, yep, still live in the UK, despite the fact that they had what, 5 years to get out for free after the Brexit vote?
If it doesn't affect your life in any other way expect to make you wait more time at airports, it has affected your life in a negative way, no? Which then just leads back to the issue of your country making this change for absolutely no reason that no-one has been able to explain beyond "gave Boris a chance to play PM for a bit", with large promises of extra cash for NHS and various other benefits that didn't come. Which is my point; why should millennial Remainers vote for Tories if what they get for voting Tories is... that?
But I was not talking about 55 % of Brits. I was talking about Millennial Remainers.
Compared to all the doom and gloom that everyone was predicting, the answer rounds down to "no".
There's plenty of reasons. It's just that the Brexiters were betrayed.
Compared to the glorious benefits that were promised, the answer rounds up to "yes". Better to judge policy by its actual effects, rather than by stupid weakmen so easily acquired.
I disagree, if I was a Brit, it would be right about torches and pitchforks time for the Tories.
Disagree how? Many great things were promised, and I'd argue people didn't deliver; many weakmen were spewed, both pro and anti Brexit, and judging any policy by them is silly. Just which are we disagreeing with?
I disagree that it's a weakman. They promised taking back control, and they're using their freshly gained independence to copy-paste EU policies anyway. At that point you're better off just staying in the EU.
The Remainer arguments aren't weakmen either. Papers of Record and The Experts were warning against disaster (food and medicine shortages for example).
Both sides were making serioous arguments and were wrong and/or lying, so they deserve to be set adrift, not to be shrugged off as "weakmen".
But they have been experiencing food shortages. Not the disastrous kind, just the annoying and painful and expensive kind that tends to happen in wealthy nations in this day and age.
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Again, all of this is at the crux of the issue. If even the Brexiteers cannot offer better answers to questions like "What good did the Brexit actually do to anyone?" or "Why didn't the promises made to achieve Brexit come through?" than "Well, it wasn't as bad as the Remainers claimed" or "Brexiteers were betrayed" or "The fault lies with EU coming after Britain for doing Brexit", well... none of those really answer those questions?
If the question is whether Brexit was good or not, "not as bad as claimed" or "well, you see, there were problems but it wasn't due to Brexiteers" are, at the very least, not particularly arguments for it being actually good. If a general loses a battle then he has lost a battle, no matter how much his latter memoirs talk about how the battle wasn't lost as badly as others claim or how his superiors shared the blame or how the enemy used unfair tactics or whatever.
I'm not sure why other haven't said t yet but wasn't the obvious point that self determination is a terminal good in it's own right? Perhaps the patriotism has been totally drained from the millennial British marrow but do you really need to measure the utility of your nation to not be subsumed by a much larger entity in order to value it? Self determination is an abstract value I suppose but it seems incredibly short sighted to place zero value on things that don't directly translate to immediate material benefit.
How far do you take the idea that self-determination is a terminal good? Like, would it be better for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom because that would mean they have more self-determination? Would it be better for individual states to leave the United States because it would improve their self-determination?
Unless self-determination is a good that, at any quantity and put to any purpose, is always worth a trade off against a material benefit you're going to need some justification for why we should give up some material benefit to get more self-determination. Are any Brexiters even attempting to make that case?
If put briefly I'd probably answer yeschad.jpg to your examples but more nuancedly, at least in the US context, I think it'd be sufficient to just scope the power of the federal government to what it actually needs at that scope. And institution to keep the different states working together cohesively is good and necessary. Maintaining a combined military force for protecting the common interest is good and necessary. That same organization being empowered to put me in a cage for years because I ingest a plant no one in my community would ever object to or have the wrong shape of gun that the leader of my community also has is not good or necessary and the only reason it has that power is that these unpopular people in my community found out they could get their way against the local interest by appealing to a higher authority that happens to be gerrymandered just so that they can then force their views on other people.
I get that this isn't a super bright line and people will have different opinions about what the scope the outside layers of the onion of politics actually need but I am confident at least in saying that wherever the line is we crossed it so long ago and come so far that I can not see it from where I am.
Well, the powers of EU are considerably lesser than those of US federal government (in practice and even moreso in theory), so what's the problem for the UK, then? The rest of Europe does certainly not appear to see this sovereignty issue this way, and for many Eastern European countries, one of the ideas for joining EU was that it would actually increase their sovereignty (ie. serve as something that would wrench them from the presumed Russian sphere of interest).
Of course, evidently there is a number of people in GB who see Brexit as a sovereignty issue and voted Leave due to this... but then again these people are not really the topic of interest vis-a-vis the article starting this thread, either.
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Self-determination would sound better to millennials, I think, if their candidates were getting elected. I am 28 years of age and comfortably millennial; if I'd been a Brit, the Conservative party would have ruled my nation for all my adult life and change. Of course British millennials are going to wonder if they should care about a self-determination that never, ever, not once, seems to go the way they'd prefer.
There is being frustrated with your politics not being popular enough to come into power, as a kind of vaguely libertarian leaning person trust that I understand this, but it's quite another thing to want and outsider organization to control your country in order to force an politics that is not popular on the people just because it seems to, for the moment, align with your politics. This is not a democratic impulse if that is still a thing that matters to people.
The United States is full of people who much preferred for abortion to remain undemocratically legal nationwide, and just as full of people who not coincidentially prefer it remain up to the state level of government, rather than anything so close to the people as the county level, or even just individual people. I don't know that I'd call everyone who takes these views anti-democratic, but it doesn't seem too different from the Brexit issue either.
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I disagree. Simply put, I'm happy to concede the way Brexit was done was pointless, but that doesn't change the fact that in the best case Remainers were wrong about the consequences of Brexit, and in the worst case were just lying about them to discourage it.
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