One of the supposed advantages of capitalist domination of our economies is that a group of profit seeking elites would at least put their thumb on the scale to stop economic self-owns like Brexit, instead the elites enthusiastically supported it at every juncture.
Excluding actual wars, Brexit is one of the greatest own-goals of all time. Britain and Europe had forged something their finest leaders and intellectuals considered an impossible dream: an alliance of shared prosperity.
Then Britain tore it up in a fit of nativist dipshittery.
Time after time in every era, we find that the wealthy oligarchs *oppose* policies that would lead to faster economic growth and they welcome destructive reactionary economic measures because they'd always rather protect their power than grow their wealth.
I mean I'm not disappointed exactly, this is common behavior for elites in every era of human history! But there's no reason to accept reactionary's false frame of "economic growth vs [human rights, environmentalist, labor rights, welfare programs etc]" because the elites oppose economic growth
I feel like this is a huge case of, like, the elites are less interested in being richer than they are in being locally more powerful in really petty ways, and I'm very disappointed in them.
It's frequently self-destructive too! It's similar to the historical dynamic of monarchs who had the choice to abrogate power to legislatures and become constitutional monarchs or try to hold onto absolutism. The constitutional monarchs typically lasted and the absolutists got violently overthrown!
But the ways in which they're becoming more powerful due to Brexit are so petty compared to what they're losing! Then again I've always thought they were fundamentally broken by their abusive schooling systems.
Yup! The thing where so many of our elites got there in the first place by committing crimes biases them pretty strongly against anything that strengthens state capacity, no matter how innocuous. bsky.app/profile/kith...
There's a corollary to this where people think just because they accurately observe that say Donald Trump or Elon Musk are stupid, they cannot hurt them or do not require opposition. Someone stupid can still hurt you if they have power! bsky.app/profile/pfes...
This isn't quite your point, but I think a generation inspired by Michael Corleone and Hannibal Lecter has convinced us that evil is generally brilliant, just pure rational egoism, when actually evil and self-destructive stupidity go together far more often.
