Trump or Clinton

Is Theresa May a Trump or a Clinton?

The people of Britain, still in shock over their own decision to leave the E.U., are dying for a hint.
Image may contain Theresa May Necklace Jewelry Accessories Accessory Human Person and Bead
By SAMUEL KUBANI/AFP/Getty Images.

Five weeks after Britain placed a loaded gun inside its mouth by voting to leave the European Union, two questions now weigh most heavily upon the minds of those inside the United Kingdom. First, what have we done? And, second, exactly what is our new prime minister, Theresa May, who sided with Remain but has insisted upon Brexit, up to?

The first question perhaps deserves an exclamation point rather than a question mark, but I have inserted the latter since it is still not exactly clear what we have done and how things are going to work out here in the U.K. There is no plan, and no one even has the first idea what Brexit actually means, including, it seems, May herself, who does a good impression of the White Queen’s surreal certainty in Alice in Wonderland, and says often and with great conviction that Brexit means Brexit, but refuses to elaborate further.

May has instead embarked on a European tour, meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, of Germany; President Francois Hollande, of France; Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, of Italy; and, crucially, the First Minister Nichola Sturgeon, of Scotland. (Of course, the balkanization of the United Kingdom into separate, squabbling parts is one possible outcome of Brexit.) May, meanwhile, has reigned supreme. It is a little-remarked upon irony of these extraordinary times that the leader of the governing Conservative Party—the one that inflicted its own deep, psychological divisions on the nation by forcing the referendum—is now polling up to 16 points ahead of the chaotic Labour Party, and has no effective opposition in Parliament. At this precise moment, you could reasonably argue that Britain is effectively a one-party state.

The prime minister’s only real opposition comes from within her own party. But even hard-line, Conservative Brexit supporters cannot protest since they don’t know what May is saying to European leaders, all of whom, incidentally, have their own acute problems related to the recent terrorist attacks, migration, and, in Italy’s case, a banking crisis. She has quieted such possible dissent, too, with appointments. May has made four of the main Brexit campaigners ministers. And she has granted three of them—Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary; David Davis, the minister for exiting the E.U.; and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary—the use of a vast 17th-century pile, Chevening, in Kent, which is the sort of country house that might have appeared in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Just like the 30s, we now have a country house full of plotters—the Chevening Cabal, perhaps—which may seem a dangerous thing for the prime minister to encourage, if not for the mildly ridiculous notion that these middle-aged Conservative nationalists are doing their level best to wreck the country from the privileged splendor of an Inigo Jones building.

From the evidence of the last three weeks, we may conclude that May understands power and knows how to use it. She has moved quickly to see how the land lies in Europe, although her policy on the E.U. is so far one of calculated vagueness. She is tough and seems canny about her colleagues. I would guess that she has got the Chevening Cabal precisely where she wants them. It is worth remembering that she was not accompanied by her blithering foreign secretary or either of her trade ministers on her flying foreign visits in the last couple of weeks.

Even if there are not answers to either of these questions, there is one certainty: things are very fluid, and not just in British politics. Europe has changed since the Brexit vote and the problems across the E.U. will facilitate further eruptions to arise from within. Apart from its serious banking crisis, Italy has its own constitutional referendum in the fall; and next spring, France faces the most dangerous presidential election since the war: the fascist National Front leader Marine Le Pen is currently recording double the polling numbers of President Hollande.

After the recent terrorist attacks in France and Germany, anything is possible; three weeks ago, members of the European Parliament voted to bring back border controls and end free movement of people within the E.U., the issue upon which Britons mainly voted to leave. It is not inconceivable that European leaders will heed this call from M.E.P.s. These could actually provide May with opportunities for exiting the European Union without pulling the trigger on that Glock that’s clenched between our teeth.

What have we done? That is the thought that we still wake to every morning and it is fascinating that so many people who voted to leave the E.U. are asking themselves this same question. Many Brexiters, it seems, are rapidly discovering that they have voted against their own interests. Last week, I launched a small Web site, which I am considering naming Exit Wounds, that aggregates news about job losses and company movements caused by Brexit. The evidence of the economic catastrophe piles up every day and it is already clear that two groups, in particular, farmers and pensioners, have voted against their own economic well being. Farmers will lose hundreds of millions of pounds in E.U. subsidies, while pensioners, by far the largest group to vote to leave, face an eye-watering deficit that climbed more than £100 billion in one week.

How did people make such a disastrous decision in the face of categorical warnings from the Bank of England, I.M.F., and O.E.C.D.? I was reminded of this question while watching Michael Bloomberg’s terrific speech about Donald Trump at last week’s Democratic National Convention. Bloomberg’s plea to reason and self-interest was familiar. “I understand the appeal of a businessman president,” he said. “But Trump’s business plan is a disaster in the making. He would make it harder for small businesses to compete, do great damage to our economy, threaten the retirement savings of millions of Americans, lead to greater debt and more unemployment, erode our influence in the world, and make our communities less safe.” It so happens that all except the last of these points were enumerated by British leaders as among the reasons to stay in the E.U.

This offers a profoundly important lesson for the Hillary Clinton campaign about the similarity between Trump supporters and Brexit supporters. Apart from the fact that they are tired of listening to experts and establishment politicians, these two constituencies overlap in one other important respect. They have suffered greatly since the financial crisis in 2008. In the U.K., the real wages of the median worker have fallen between 8 and 10 percent, while the middle class in the United States, has lost nearly 30 percent of its wealth. In the United States, middle-income Americans are often working much harder for much less.

Some commentators have compared this nationalistic moment with the one that emerged after the Great Depression. But the similarities are largely superficial. As the former deputy prime minister of Poland Jacek Rostowski shrewdly pointed out in the F.T., it is the wealthier countries that have turned the furthest right since 2008; the countries that have had a bad time—such as Greece, Spain and Italy, for example—have not elected extreme governments from the left or right. This current moment does, however, bear similarity to another dark historical moment. “We may not be reliving the dark 1930s,” he wrote. “But the wishful thinking and irresponsibility of those in comparatively well-performing countries bears an uncanny resemblance to the way nations in Europe” went off to war in 1914.

There are reasons why people may prefer to listen to Trump rather than Bloomberg, or Johnson rather than an array of British experts, who knew what they were talking about—and have been proved right in most of their predictions—and they are not all economic. Something has changed in the discourse to allow sane people to test the political system to its limits and vote against their interests. The correct analysis of that change will, I suspect, be one of things that determines whether Clinton wins or lose in November.