
The Roman 'Brexit': how life in Britain changed after 409 AD - briatx
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-roman-brexit-life-britain-ad.html
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georgeecollins
The direction of history is not always towards progress. One of the reasons
why I think people felt like it was safe to make a protest vote for Brexit is
because in general things have gone very well for the Western world for the
last fifty years. It doesn't feel that risky to throw a wrench (spanner?) into
the works.

~~~
wahern
Not only have we collectively forgotten WWII, we've forgotten that we've
forgotten.

We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I
studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s
in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much
the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from
interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and
_everything_ changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that
curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the
unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately
articulated in text.

The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international
order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of
Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s.
Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need
to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have
taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were
predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.

~~~
martythemaniak
> rising working-class unrest

Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor
have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly
plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken
a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data.

Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or
have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over
something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their
dominant social status.

I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because
it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution.
Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because
there really isn't any solution.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential-
anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-
working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/)

~~~
wahern
Class and culture are inextricably linked.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Great Society legislation only happened
because working- and middle- whites felt comfortable with their economic
security.[1][2] The loss of well-paying blue collar industrial jobs may have
been partly compensated with cheap domestic goods.[3] But nothing has
compensated for the loss of jobs that one could reasonably expect to last for
decades, if not for one's entire working life. You're not going to give on
cultural issues if you feel that you're losing on the economic front. Quite
the contrary, you're going to become extremely defensive and even cynical.

I'm not excusing racism and prejudice. Quite the opposite--I'm saying that it
never left, its expression in popular politics only temporarily diminished.

[1] It helped that the poster children for Great Society legislation were,
literally, white Appalachian children.

[2] I'm sure the same could be said for immigration in the U.K. It was
tolerated or even affirmed by a working class who felt economically secure.
Once they felt threatened economically by immigration, and as memories of the
Empire faded along with a sense of intrinsic superiority, relatively dormant
ethnic animus returned to the fore.

[3] As conservatives infamously argued during the 2016 election; that quality
of life has remained undiminished or has even improved, notwithstanding
stagnant wages, by pointing to A/C and refrigerator ownership rates. That's
true to an extent but largely irrelevant to how people perceive equity and
fairness.

~~~
barberousse
Another point on this line is W.E.B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction in
America", wherein he writes extensively on how post-civil war racist discourse
was designed to not only persist discrimination of blacks, but to also
convince poor whites that blacks were the problem, and not the rich white
capitalists that were _actually_ screwing them over. So its fascinating that
we see, amidst a climate of economic, social, and political uncertainty,
exactly that tactic return in the election of Trump, who convinces the white
working class that "he's a straight shooter", "he tells it like is", and my
favorite, "he's honest" (paraphrasing CNN Presidential Election night
coverage, interviewing Trump voters after his win) and pandering latent racist
biases, while guaranteeing further entrenchment of the standing politico-
economic order.

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slededit
Connecting this to Brexit is really distasteful and misleading.

The Roman Empire no longer had the will or material to support Britain and
left them to their own devices against they’re will. They had no political or
military systems in place to replace the Roman support.

None of this has any correlation with today.

~~~
barberousse
Not even reasonable to say we're even discussing the same people given the
descendants of the people who lived under Roman rule are more indirectly
attested to by way of the Welsh, which was the last bastion of Celtic autonomy
south of Hadrian's Wall. The modern Englishman is not really related to those
Celtic people but is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon invaders mentioned in the
article.

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vondur
Silly comparison. Brexit is nothing like when the Romans abandoned Britain. If
you want to look anywhere for an example of the "Dark Ages" post Roman Britain
is the best example of it. I don't think that will be the case in the post
Brexit UK.

~~~
wahern
The Dark Ages never lacked for philosophical or scientific advances. What
really defines the Dark Ages is a splintered Europe lacking a relatively
cohesive identity and political structure by which ideas and goods could more
freely travel. The speed of exchange is what accelerated advancement.[1]

The real question is whether and to what extent do shared identity and
political structures matter in the Information Age. We're about to find out,
not just in Brexit but as conservatives everywhere systematically dismantle
the post-WWII order.

[1] If it accelerated at all. Again, the Dark Ages seem muddy because there's
no singular historical narrative that can be articulated. Because we don't
articulate a narrative, we tend to assume the period lacked an historical arc,
and in particular lacked an arc of progression.

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vertline3
I'm an outsider, but I read that there was a feeling of a democracy deficit
happening.

