Politics

1776 Was Amexit

Two hundred and forty years before Brexit, there was Amexit, also known as the American Revolution.  In terms of historical consequence, the Brexit vote and the American Revolution don’t occupy the same universes, but they are connected by a belief in popular sovereignty and a refusal to be governed by a remote authority with only an attenuated mechanism — if that — for representation. 

In Brexit, the British people decided that their Parliament should trump the governing machinery of the EU, and in our Revolution we decided that our Colonial assemblies should trump the governing machinery of the British Empire. Both acts exhibited a punctiliousness about government by consent that struck critics as unreasonable and even dangerous. The Revolution fed off popular passions that shocked and embarrassed some Colonial elites who were more cautious about separating from Britain, in an echo of the elite reaction to Brexit. John Adams pushed back against the “sneers and snubbs” directed at “the multitude, the million, the populace, the vulgar, the mob, the herd and the rabble, as the great always delight to call them.” (I’m in the debt of the magisterial new book Toward Democracy, for this and other quotes.)