The British people voted yesterday to leave the European Union.
The vote stunned the “elite” around the world.
And the move has shaken the European Union, a largely disconnected governmental bureaucracy made up of tens of thousands of “officials” occupying nearly 95 fancy buildings in Brussels that impose laws, taxes and regulations with little to no accountability. The Brussels “gravy train” is made up of lobbyists, bureaucrats, and ‘charity’ or NGO groups that enrich themselves. Many “officials” make between $200,000 to $400,000 a year!
Sound familiar?
Yesterday’s vote is a stark reminder that the voice of the people cannot be repeatedly ignored.
The elites would have us believe that the future requires more consolidation of power in the hands of big governments, and elites like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their progressive allies that believe they know what is best for everyone. But the British people proved by their overwhelming vote that large bureaucracies and elites gathered in distant cities will not dictate the future.
Movements connected to the heart and soul of the people can and will rise up and win.
In short, Brexit is a win for subsidiarity!
Subsidiarity is an often neglected but very important principle in Catholic social teaching. It teaches that social problems are best handled (as much as possible) by the institution which is closest to the actual problem itself. After all, your neighbors, the local parish, or the charity located in your town often have much more knowledge of the problems on the ground, and the best solutions to cope with them.
But a devolution of power to local control is not at all what elites like Barack Obama and billionaire George Soros want. They want rigid blanket policies handed down from far-away capital cities. They like being in power. They like control. They snobbily believe ordinary people need to be looked after and controlled.
A flourishing local culture with institutions crafted by people across generations becomes a “problem” to these elites. A problem they think must be “transformed” so it’s in harmony with their utopian vision of a global culture, controlled by science, technology and a secular humanist ideology.
The Brexit vote is a wake up call for big government elites around the world. And it could be headed here next.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has already announced that he will resign. Scotland is calling for another vote on whether to separate from the United Kingdom. And it’s not just in the British Isles. Other countries in Europe are likely to revisit their membership in the EU. There will likely be renewed calls by the Catalonia region to secede from Spain. We might see several changes to the map in Europe.
A quiet revolution of the people is catching fire. People are fed up with big unaccountable governments dictating their lives, ruining their jobs, taxing them into oblivion to enrich special interests and cronies.
In some ways, Margaret Thatcher’s shocking win in 1979 foreshadowed an electoral shift in the United States a year later.
Perhaps history is repeating itself.