Brexit — The Ultimate “Triumph” Of Voter-As-Consumer

We’ll be seeing lots of more of this kind of thing, I would assume:

Mandy Suthi, a student who voted to leave, told ITV News she would tick the Remain box if she had a second chance and said her parents and siblings also regretted their choice.

“I would go back to the polling station and vote to stay, simply because this morning the reality is kicking in,” she said.

“I wish we had the opportunity to vote again,” she added, saying she was “very disappointed”.

Khembe Gibbons, a lifeguard from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, also said she had regrets about her decision after Mr Farage said he could not guarantee NHS funding.

“We’ve left the EU, David Cameron’s resigned, we’re left with Boris, and Nigel has just basically given away that the NHS claim was a lie,” she wrote.

“I personally voted leave believing these lies, and I regret it more than anything, I feel genuinely robbed of my vote.”

A woman calling into an LBC radio show echoed the sentiment, saying she felt “conned” by the claim and felt “a bit sick”.

A voter who gave his name as Adam told the BBC he would have changed his pro-Brexit vote if he knew the short-term consequences it would have for the UK economy.

“The David Cameron resignation has blown me away to be honest and the period of uncertainty that we’re going to be magnified now so yeah, I’m quite worried,” he said.

“I’m shocked that we voted for Leave, I didn’t think that was going to happen. I didn’t think my vote was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain.”

I don’t know how many Brexit voters fall into the remorseful category. But I remember seeing somewhere (HELP ME BROCKINGTON) that a large majority of Brexit voters assumed that Remain would win. For what was surely a decisive number of Brexit voters, the vote was not a considered view that leaving the EU would be better than remaining, but rather was a vehicle for sending a message to British elites.

To be clear, the biggest villains here are not ordinary voters. David Cameron’s entirely unnecessary gamble was astoundingly incompetent and grossly irresponsible. The reaction of Boris Johnson — the proverbial dog that caught the car — should make it pretty clear that the anti-EU faction of the Tories were more trolls than revolutionaries. And the way you deal with trolls is to ignore them, not to try to shut them up with a binding referendum with huge downside risks. Needless to say, Johnson and Farage and the pro-Brexit tabloids are absolutely shameless liars mobilizing racist resentment, and they deserve all of the criticism they receive and worse. But Cameron knew what they were, and he empowered them to try to gain a short-term advantage within his party.

But if you want to know why I spend so much time criticizing people with prominent platforms trying to convince people the ballot box is not a place for collective political decisions but for life-affirming consumer choices, well, Bregret is why. In the American context, the consumerist arguments from the nominal left for refusing to support Democratic candidates even as the consequences of a Republican victory get increasingly dire generally don’t even really pretend to be tactical; they’re just statements that certain individuals are too good for coalitions that require sharing political space with people who fail to see your unfailing wisdom. This stuff seems harmless until it isn’t. If you want to know when I’m going to stop criticizing pundits who try to encourage this kind of thinking, or the Ralph Naders and (now, apparently) Jill Steins willing to play with fire to stoke their own egos, the answer is “never.” Elections are literally life-and-death matters.