I'm pretty much in with Matt on this one. I would have voted (were I a Brit) for a Brexit in about 1.5 seconds.
To me the central issue here was not one of unity but one of sovereignty. The English folk (who I have a great affinity for) had simply lost much of their own ability to influence British policy. Their "popular sovereignty" had been surrendered to layer upon layer of unelected apparatchiks.
The original idea of the European Union was one of borderless trade. That morphed into one of currency unity, which was bound to mean that strong European economies were going to pack the Greeks, etc. But that united currency was critical if you were going to rival the US AND have (essentially) borderless travel and trade.
Good enough.
But somehow that ended up into borderless immigration. Once you were in Hungary you were in Norway or the Netherlands......or Manchester. And like it or not, a"typical" Belgian moving to Germany (or the UK) is (likely) not the same thing as a your "typical" Syrian doing the same, at least in fairly unlimited numbers.
Nations are nations and the electorate the electorate only if they have some control over their own affairs. Such was the thing that 52% of Brits saw was missing.
As to Matt's religion points: Religion is built, of course, on some structure of orthodoxy. "If it feels good, do it," is a great 1970's mantra but a lousy platform to build a religion on.
I concur.
But they certainly aren't all xenophobes and yahoos. I am certainly not! Well, I'm not a xenophobe anyway.....the yahoo thig is debatable.
I found President Obama's "end of the que" efforts pretty silly and definately wrong. We're tied pretty closely to the Brits, like it or not. I like it, by the way.
And the "Chicken Little" warnings of PM Cameron and others a bit too juvenile for my tastes.
As to Matt's religion discussion:REligion has to be built on some sense of orthodoxy. Even the Buddha's "Middle Path" is an orthodoxy. So there is always some top down structure. Man, even the Calvinists and their Presbyters had some uniform orthodox beliefs. Plenty of them, as it turns out. They believed in some local control over religions affairs...but not over common orthodoxy.
"Globalization" of trade is not the same as "glbalization" of values. "Globalization" of some (greater...and mostly from on high) values is certainly a must.
But (lack of) immigration control, VATs, penal climate directives, etc. are not of that sort.
The Brits voted against a picayune-intrusive-autocratic-technocratic nanny Uber-State over which they had no control. Good for them
The markets will recover.
Moe