May I admit that I’ve given up on understanding Brexit? It sounds like stupid people stampeding after a stupid idea, with an ineffectual opposition making pointless motions in a parliamentary dance. I don’t get it. I’m lost.
The government has been defeated by MPs on propositions that they themselves backed two weeks ago. The whole edifice of blather and nonsense is coming tumbling down.
It’s commonly accepted that there’s no majority in the Commons for any given response to Brexit. But today it went a step further. It was inadequacy squared. It is clear now that there is not even a majority for the imaginary things MPs had only recently given a majority to. The whole British political system is imploding in on itself.
It might seem like reasonless chaos, but there is a moral message to what is happening here. You cannot govern on the basis of gibberish. You cannot make gurgled yearnings the basis for your negotiating posture. Because the lack of meaning in those original propositions means that they do not work as functional foundations of policy.
This is what the farce looks like when it’s untangled. May was defeated on her Brexit deal last month. It did not win the support of the opposition parties or her own MPs. They were concerned about the backstop, which would prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.
I’m not picking on Great Britain — it’s the same thing happening here in the US. In our case, it’s an incompetent madman who has become the chief executive, with the conservative party backing everything he does because it keeps them in power.
So we’ve got two great countries paralyzed by idiocy, at the same time. WTF? And where’s the revolution?