The Full English

It isn't very often I get to react to breaking news in this space, given that it is a) thrown together late on Thursday nights, which is a very small temporal window to fit through for world events, great and small; especially since I live on the West Coast of the United States, which is essentially a time-island out of sync with the rest of the world's circadian rhythm, and b) the idea of "news" and all the attendant requirements of "understanding" things are very much anathema to the animating impulse of this now-preposterously-long-running enterprise, which is and always has been: hurry up and get done, there are new episodes of Archer on the DVR.

But just before I sat down to bang my orangutan fists on the keyboard of my hardy laptop,* the news came down that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union. If this is confusing or surprising to you, maybe you've heard it by its cutesy news portmanteau nickname for the "British exit," the "Britishexit." Look, I don't like it either. It's clumsy and awkward to say and saves you almost no time typing out the one word instead of the two separate ones. It's no "Bennifer," that's for fucking sure. But what is, right? What else burns like a comet, full of portents and cosmic momentum, the faintest, fleeting proof of the existence of a benevolent God only to inevitably flicker and falter... Goddamn it, I knew better than to go down this tangent. I need a second...

If you really want to understand the proposition of Britain leaving the EU in detail, I recommend you do what a majority of Americans do these days and check in with a comedy news satire show of your preference. I liked the bit on it by John Oliver from Last Week Tonight if you're really interested. I mean, it's a bit long and information-y to be funny in the traditional American sense, but it is read out by a British person, so it does have the unearned patina of intellectual rigor arbitrarily assigned to anything we hear spoken in an English accent. Seriously, have someone read Harry Potter to you in an American accent. It's fucking gibberish.

In just about every way, the British exit from the EU seems like the sort of triumph of the short-sighted and small-minded that always leads to suffering, regret and repeal in the long run. As an American by birth, acculturation and ongoing active choice, maybe it really isn't my place to say. As a Californian however, I have a ton of experience watching the effects of the short-sighted and small-minded as we have a weird reputation for leaning way too heavily on direct democracy to solve our problems. Usually by creating other problems, that are then settled by the courts. Would it be faster and cheaper to have our actual elected legislature in Sacramento tackle some of the big issues? Sure, but if we wait to go through the cycle of a statewide election campaign to consider a ballot issue and the virtually automatic lawsuits and appeals should it pass, we give ourselves the out of blaming the result on a judge instead of ourselves. Direct democracy is a chaotic mess, but it does get the root truth of Western post-Enlightenment governmental philosophy right: plausible deniability.

Direct democracy is a great idea though, right? I mean, if you leave it up to those fat-cats in Washington or Sacramento or city hall or the homeowner's association governing board, you know they're all taking kickbacks and bribes from Big Beige and next thing you know, nobody's allowed to paint their house orange anymore. In America. Land of the free? My ass.

The downsides are kind of obvious, but it's an omelets-and-eggs kind of situation. Sure, you get tax controls that actual politicians are unlikely to ever have seriously considered, but sometimes, yeah, OK, you have to put up with a massive public outing of your state as a home to xenophobic racism or unreconstructed homophobia as those things are (temporarily, thank you nonexistent god[s]) codified into written, binding law. They get overturned as the obviously terrible and morally indefensible ideas they always were in the end, of course, but giving the pitchfork tyrants a space to not just have their say but impose it on the rest of us--including, most importantly, the vulnerable minority groups whose existence they wish to exploit to score the odd political point--is thorny, troublesome and expensive.

I'm sort of a fanatic when it comes to free speech. It's the one truest thing the Constitution got absolutely right. Be as awful as you want. Hate women and gays and Mexicans and non-Christians or whomever else all you like. Turn it into a cottage industry if you want. Hell, ride it all the way to the GOP nomination for president. Fine. Even if your goal is to try to get as many people as you can to agree with whatever flammable bile it is you're vomiting out. Great. Convince away. But representative democracy is the other really great thing the Constitution gets right. Even when the electorate was severely limited by enfranchisement requirements like gender, race and status, the wise organizing impulse existed to say "Hang on, we'll let these inbred fuckers keep their muzzle-loading muskets, but let's make sure we build in a firewall between them and actual laws." And that's what your congressman and senator is/are. They're a pressure-release valve. Passions are volatile among the lumpenproles who will murder each other for the idea of a steeply discounted toaster oven. Legislators have a vested interest in slowing the process down, filtering out what is practical or achievable, then deciding not to do that but instead promise to get a lot of stuff done... you know, later. In the next elected term. Please send money.

It sounds like gross careerism, but that's only because it is, luckily. We, the People, are not to be trusted. A person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals. And if you need more evidence of that, realize I skipped all the available de Tocqueville or Federalist Papers quotes that I don't actually know and decided just then to make my point by ripping off Men in Black. That's about all of our speed.

Yes, even in places like California, the Left Coast, the hippie/hipster paradise with the medicinal weed and the electric car parking stations, it's a sobering reminder that shit like Props 8 or 187 can pass. Because direct democracy is after all a series of referenda, which can trade on the quirks of a momentary political reality and make it into what should be a universally applicable law. And it's in those moments the opportunists and the proto- or crypto-fascists have a distinct, demagoguery advantage. Just like they did in Britain.

Keep in mind though that Britain is where representative democracy was invented. They've been tempering the whims of their dumb people way longer than we've been holding back the whims of our dumb people. A referendum is good clean fun, but they do always have the option of reminding their dumb people that, just kidding, their government knows better.

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*I praise its longevity, but at this point it's got such a dated, bulky, brushed-steel aesthetic it looks like it belongs on an IKEA showroom floor. As a desk.