A Radical Proposal After Brexit: End the European Union and Begin Destructive Creation

A Radical Proposal After Brexit: End the European Union and Begin Destructive Creation

By Peter Turchin at Evonomics

https://evonomics.com/a-radical-proposal-after-brexit/

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The overall trend over the last 10,000 years has been for humans evolving to cooperate in ever larger societies—from living in farming villages of a few hundred people to nation-states of today and even supra-national formations like the EU. But cooperation is fragile. We know from studying history that cooperation tends to go up and down in cycles. Currently, and according to all the indicators, both the United States and the European Union are in a downward, disintegrative, phase of the cooperation cycle.

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Betrayal of the Elites

The political elites in UK were overwhelmingly in favor of staying, but the majority of the population voted to leave. We see similar gulfs develop between the elites and people in other European countries (notably, Germany). Why? Some answers are suggested by The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, published 20 years ago by Christopher Lasch. Lasch’s book is a powerful social critique of the American elites, but many of his charges now apply to the European leaders—self-serving, globalist, and disdainful of people they govern.

This development is, in large part, a result of the spread of the corrosive ideology of neoliberalism from the US to Europe. As the European elites adopted the neoliberal views en masse, it changed their attitudes and behaviors in several ways.

First, neoliberalism freed them to pursue self-serving policies, such as reducing corporate taxes:


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