I haven’t been following the Scottish independence referendum all that closely until this week, so I can’t say whether a separate Scotland makes sense for the Scots — and, besides, it’s not my call; it’s theirs. But this piece from The New York Times’ Upshot blog offers an interesting take, placing the vote within the context of a rebellion against elites that has been bubbling up from below.
Neil Irwin, the author, connects the dots between the Scots, the Tea Party and a backlash within the European Union. While there are ideological differences — the Scots are largely leftist while the Tea Party is to the extreme right — there is a common thread: anger at governing institutions’ failure to safeguard the population as the world economy tanked.
It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.
The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.
As he says,
The details of the policy mistakes are different, as are the political movements that have arisen in protest. But together they are a reminder that no matter how entrenched our government institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.
When they don’t, they supposed to face consequences. “Power,” after all, “is not a right; it is a responsibility.”
The choice that the Scots are making on Thursday is about whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: People don’t think the way things are going is good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.
Populist energy can swing both ways — see Occupy and the Tea Party — so the shape that a populist revolt might have in the United States is in dispute. As things stand, there remains more energy on the right than on the left, meaning that the most vulnerable populations might be endangered if the anger reaches a tipping point. That doesn’t mean the left should abandon populism in favor of a broken meritocracy (see Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites), but rather that the left needs to develop a more effective populist infrastructure that speak more effectively to those who are angry over being left behind by American capitalism.
Hank Kalet 