Brexiteers are fighting against the thereapeutic caliphate for liberty and the people’s will

American Christopher Caldwell is the best political analyst writing today. His latest article on Brexit is very good. 

These quotations are from an article about that article, by Greg Sheridan in the Australian, headlined 'Brexiteers fighting for liberty and the people’s will'.

The clash is between two conflicting world views. One is a postmodern, undemocratic, technocrat state in the service of what a German author calls the Therapeutic Caliphate, or what we might less exaltedly call the left-liberal crack-up, a la the EU, which has as its purpose the eradication of national identity and the transformation of human nature. The other is a civic vision that recognises the universal quality of humanity but puts the nation-state at the heart of democratic and civic loyalty, and which honours traditional sources of wisdom and authority, and traditional forms of democracy....

I couldn't agree more him or with Mr Caldwell, who gets to the heart of why it is important for the world that Britain brexits successfully. 

Cald­well argues that Remainers faithfully represent the modern European constitutional tradition. This is a tradition that empowers a technocratic elite, built on documents with plenty of abstract nouns that inevitably give great legislative power to judges. The pincer movement of bureaucracy, ruling-class ideological uniformity and judicial activism restricts the space for normal democratic decision-making.

He writes:

“These shift power from electorates and parliaments to managers of information, inside government and out. From thousand-year-old constitutional ideas to five-year-old ones, from habeas corpus to gender identity. Because it was Britain that did most to construct the ideal of liberty which is now being challenged, Brexit clarifies the constitutional stakes for the world as nothing else.”

Caldwell lays a brilliant sociological insight across his political analysis. In the old British constitutional system, which Brexiteers want to uphold and restore, courts had very little role in reviewing British legislation. In the EU system everything is ultimately decided by courts. All EU member nations must submit to European law and the European human rights court. But judicial and technocratic activism combined mean the courts can determine almost anything. A written right to home privacy and security, provided for in one of the European charters, for example, can enable a court to disallow more or less any measure at all it doesn’t like. As Caldwell shrewdly observes, once politics is “judicialised” all politicians become “mere talkers”.

However, he also makes the devastating observation that judicialising politics actually represents an enormous transfer of power from the poor to the rich. The judiciary is drawn from an extremely narrow band of society, typically from successful lawyers who are generally by birth and education, and then professionally, among the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest people in the society, and generally hold all the approved opinions. Parliaments, on the other hand, represent all kinds of people and have all kinds of people in them — rich and poor, smart and dumb, traditional and iconoclastic, conservative and radical.
Similarly, as Caldwell shows, removing the hereditary peers from the House of Lords but keeping it undemocratic has made it arguably less representative than when it was just composed of hereditary lords. These always contained among their number eccentrics and cranks, the relatively impoverished as well as the relatively rich. The Lords, he argues, is now less diverse and more class-bound than in its old incarnation. Now it is appointed. And it comprises “activist foundation heads, rights barristers, think-tank directors, in-the-tank journalists, and political henchmen”. Caldwell doesn’t make this point but it might have more diverse racial backgrounds than before but it has narrower ideological constraints and, as he says, a possibly narrower class range.

I especially agree about how much more democratic Britain was when all the hereditary peers (as opposed to 92 selected by the Tory party) sat in Parliament. The hereditary peers are very sorely missed indeed. In their place are quangocrats and the dreary regiment of retired party hacks and mealy-mouthed, politically correct placemen and women.

Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is the best book on the way immigration from the Third World is rapidly transforming Europe. It's not the first draft of history but real history. I lent my copy to an ambassador who did not return it or I'd reread it over and over again. I urge you to buy it.