Are Brexit, Trump, and Sanders a delayed response to the banker bailouts? Retweet
Daniel Hannan, a Eurosceptic member of the European Parliament, told Reason’s Nick Gillespie that the thing Brexit, Trump, and even Sanders share in common is a delayed reaction to the big bank bailouts [See: https://youtu.be/x7KuxDi-azo?t=13m40s]
Coincidentally, the New York Times just published an extensive piece on Steve Bannon, the Breitbart publisher who is now Trump’s chief strategist. He made his career in finance, before politics, including a stint at Goldman Sachs. But his father was a telephone linemen, who worked his way into middle management, and his daughter was a military academy grad. He noticed that his father’s retirement took a big hit in the Great Recession, but there was no bailout for him. Then, at his daughter’s graduation, he noticed that the elites weren’t sending their children into the military — into wars. His “conservatism” is a class-based response to cronyism.
It’s November, 2016, just weeks after Donald Trump’s election. The bailouts happened eight years ago. And the public response seems to be a return to the 20th century debate and division over class. When the Berlin Wall fell, that economic war was presumed to be over.
The class debate is an environment that favors socialism and communism because it starts with the premises upon which those ideologies are based. If these movements are animated by Bannon-esque anger towards the bailouts, then the ground is probably fertile for creating lower class bailouts. Everyone gets to be a crony, including college students.
Anyway… Brexit, Trump, and Sanders help demonstrate that the social environment reorganizes in astonishing and messy ways. And, it takes awhile for this organic process to materialize.