Over the past several months, like many outside the United Kingdom, I have observed the chaos that has been the process of negotiating and ratifying the terms of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union over the terms of the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union (a.k.a. Brexit).  While it is easy as an outsider to have my own opinions about what is in the best interest of the U.K. and the rest of the world in terms of the ultimate outcome, the subject of this post is mostly about what lessons that we can draw from this chaos for our own politics.

The first lesson of Brexit is the difference between the Brexit referendum and the typical referendum in the U.S.  In the U.S., a referendum is typically a vote on a legislative-type proposal.  In other words, we are being asked to approve (or reject) a specific statute or constitutional provision or tax or bond.  By contrast, the Brexit referendum were about two concepts — staying in the European Union or leaving the European Union with the terms of continued membership or departure to be defined at a later date.  While there are always problems with voting on a specific proposal (no proposal is ever perfect and a referendum is essentially a take-it-or-leave-it vote in which you can’t just approve the good parts), a vote on a concept leaves it to the future to put meat on the idea. 

The U.K. is now dealing with the problem of defining what Brexit really means.  And that requires reading the tea leaves of what the slim majority that supported Brexit really wanted.  And, in such circumstances, the final version may differ significantly from what voters thought they were approving in the original referendum. Continue Reading...