I couldn't put an exact time frame on it, but it took several years before the pro-Brexit politicians ran out of 'it will get better soon' arguments and the (majority of the) populace realised that they'd been had.
Still plenty (nowhere close to a majority, but more than a few nutters) who are certain the problem is we didn't have a hard enough Brexit. The reason the scientific method is considered an actual discovery is that this whole "In light of new data I realise I was wrong" just isn't how we tend to behave.
For many Leave voters, the fact they voted Leave necessarily means voting Leave was correct - some of them rationalise this as "I was lied to" => "Maybe Leave was the wrong choice but I was misinformed" plenty more reached "Leave was correct but politicians screwed up Leaving somehow, it's not my fault". The current iteration of the Nigel Farage party, named Reform, takes this sort of line.
Once I was writing about the Achilles and the Tortoise story in GEB where the Tortoise rejects Modus Ponens and Achilles discovers, the hard way, that it's useless to argue any point with an interlocutor who rejects this principle. Somebody else on HN pointed out that most people probably would not accept Modus Ponens. And they're probably right, as hopeless as that outcome is.
The Italian socialist opposed joining ww1. The nationalists wanted to join, and the Italians joined, on the British and French side. They fought so bad that the British had to send troops to the new Austrian - Italian front, effectively weakening the allied effort and thus the spoils of the war were none for the Italians. Who did the fascists blame, the nationalist for joining this folly? No, the socialists for sabotaging their efforts.
The MAGA ideologues can stay cultists longer than we can stay solvent? I'm in Texas, and I've got a neighbor, down the road, who was in custom home construction; he's out of business now. Why? He can't import lumber, reliably; he used to hire "under the table", and he bought small steel supplies in bulk from Alibaba. So... pretty much his entire business model is kaput. He keeps telling me that, any day now, Trump's 11D chess moves are going to make him (my neighbor) solvent again. He just sold his (white) truck, and is selling his house. Still flying his Trump flag, though.
> One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
I think this is probably the same phenomenon that makes people fall for romance scams despite the obvious red flags. Like a sunk cost fallacy for human emotion - is there a term for that? Nobody seems to want to admit they were wrong or 'had', so do the alternative - being had even more.
This is kinda close, but not a perfect fit. It's best described as the brain putting up blinders to ignore obvious problems as not to have been duped.
This is close, as it mentions changing beliefs for consistency, but not exactly the same still. The root isn't consistency, it's not having been dumb enough to get scammed.
I think it has a lot to do with who you are admitting it to. Let say you know you are wrong, but you have to admit it to your enemy. Many emotional people would rather die than do that, hah (over my dead body!). Unfortunately, this is the end-state of arousing politics. There's a whole media industry around making politics emotional now days, and quite frankly we really need it to go back to boring men and women discussing boring things on CSPAN. It was never meant for the average American (or Britain), simply because it takes too much dumbing down to make it palatable for ordinary people. It's OKAY not to know what is the right thing to do about global trade. The political-media-industrial-complex survives by making people believe they actually know what they are talking about.
It's very difficult to suggest to someone "hey, even though you invested thousands of hours ingesting this content, you actually don't know anything about it" - who wants to admit that, first to themselves, and second to your enemy?
Your Ben Shapiros, your Tuckers, Rogans, Maddows, Jon Stewarts are part of the industrial complex.
We need to find an off-ramp for people that lets them keep their dignity while accepting ignorance. I personally don't have any ideas on how to do this because here in tech, you either know your stuff or you don't, there's no ego when you don't know (you'll just look stupid).
China did it better - most of their managers are engineers. US needs to make use of this pattern. Oh, and add an IQ and an EQ test as a requirement to being a president.
There is obviously the nature of admitting to enemies that you were wrong that you touch on.
What I'm referring to is admitting to yourself that you're wrong, which seems much harder to do.
I just experienced this recently even in comments. For the record, I'm not a Trump hater, I'm rather neutral on politics. But in a recent interview Trump made an absolute fool of himself re: some guys hand tattoos. I felt secondhand embarrassment even watching it.
Yet there were so many defenders show up, to explain what he -really- meant, or that he knew it was wrong but was proving a point, etc.
I just don't get the mindset. Sometimes it's ok to admit the person you admire made a mistake. But not in the US, apparently. Because too many people have tied not only their identity but income to it.
> Your Ben Shapiros, your Tuckers, Rogans, Maddows, Jon Stewarts
That’s not really a balanced take in any way. Sure there are things that Stewart can be criticized about but at least he is generally semi rational and not a lying treasonous degenerate (like e.g. Tucker). It’s like saying that Trudeau, Trump and Putin are all the same because they are all politicians..
But it’s not the same type of media. I’m not saying it’s better or worse but its a fundamentally different genre than something like what Tucker is doing..
It sucks having some semblance of critical thinking skills as an American. It grows more painful every day and I'd rather just give myself a lobotomy at this point. I'm sure it felt similarly for many folks during Brexit who knew better.
I honestly think you are vastly overestimating how much buyer's regret there is, or even any sense of Brexit being wrong. Brexit wasn't wrong, it's everything else that was wrong!
The politicians didn't enact it decisively enough. The EU punished us. The media lied about it. The "remainiacs" did everythig in their power to stop it. etc etc
To many, Brexit is their political identity and it is a politics of blame and grudges
As an American, is that the generally-accepted viewpoint now? That Brexit was a mistake? If so, do people feel like it was an honest mistake, or do people generally believe that the politicians and businesspeople who supported it were either incompetent or hoping to benefit personally at everyone else's expense? Something else?
I'm asking because I'd really like to believe that there's a point where a convincing majority of Americans will wake up and realize that Republican (and particularly Trump) politics are a sham and have been unabashedly so since at least the first Trump administration. I would like that, but I'm not hopeful at this point.
I'm not in England but in mainland Europe and yes, I don't know a single person who sees Brexit benefiting the Brits. It was all lies and pandering for politicians benefits.
Honest question because I'm ignorant, but did any (well, many/most since I'm sure there are outliers) mainland Europeans think it would benefit the British?
As an American generally uninformed on the manner, I only heard of pro-Brexit people in Britain.
Brexit was a vote by Britain to lose all influence in its largest export market and instead hamper its industries with dual regulation and increased barriers to trade. Nobody thinking rationally would think it was a good idea. The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is and because the referendum put a boring, complicated state affairs against a fill-in-the-blanks fantasy option.
The fact that they had literally no idea what would happen to Northern Ireland after Brexit tells you all you need to know about how well considered the idea was.
Part of this is down to the politicians who were running the show - David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, thought the referendum was a good way to put the issue to bed - you've had your vote, we're staying in, shut up.
He more or less directly said that they weren't going to make any concrete plans, because he thought the idea was so bad that they weren't going to spend the money on them, and because releasing explicit plans would probably just give ammunition to the 'leave' side. It certainly would have torpedo'd one of the major arguments of the 'remain' vote, which was that a vote to leave was a vote for uncertainty.
So in that way it was a self-fulfilling threat - you don't know what's going to happen because we refuse to make a plan!
> The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is
This too is a failure of politicians over several decades - the EU was always 'them', not 'us'. It was something that happened somewhere else. It was convenient to blame the EU when UK politicians couldn't or didn't want to fix something. MEPs were always pretty anonymous, unknown by local people who then (predictably) didn't turn out to vote in EU elections very much.
No, except every countries eu-exit party. Every europeen country has a ~20% block of people who want the ratatouille of leaving EU, no immigrants, etc. Luckily countries with a multi party democracy evade being hijacked by them so far.
To the rest of europe brexit looks like voting Donny back in: the bicycle-stick-frontwheel meme. Except brexit was a bit more contained so easier to laugh at, Donny siding with the enemy in our biggest armed conflict is no joke.
They stopped talking about it. They dropped the issue from their list. In my country they went to covid masks, siding with Russia in Ukraine (one of our ministers literally called zelensky a dictator) and now back to border controls I believe. It's like the "today I'm an expert in X" meme.
They always have like five taking points to whip their base in anger and it doesn't really matter what they are but they're always a bit lunatic.
I always find it so confusing - the same people that want group X (Palestinans, Kurds, Tibetans, Catalonia, etc....) to have their own government/country, hate that Brits want to control their own country.
You're talking about two very different sentiments. People see leaving the EU as a foolish decision. But Britain has every right to make that decision if it wants. I don't know of anyone outside of Britain who "hates" that they left (in the sense of feeling anger or offense).
In fact a lot of the sentiment tends to be more like "good riddance".
You're talking as though there were blue EU tanks rolling through the English countryside and bombers from Brussels flattening biscuit factories. Britain is not and was not oppressed, it's just a former imperial power with a heavily financialized economy that is no longer the biggest wheel in a larger regional economy.
Yeah the EU is totally to the UK like Israël is to the Palestians or Turkey to the Kurds. The EU put a wall around the UK and is slowly colonizing the area.
I live in a deprived area that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit, despite almost everything good in the area being bankrolled by the EU development fund. It was very much not in our interest.
I think there were a good number of people to whom it was a coin toss: "maybe it'll turn out ok". I have friends in this group. Those, I suspect, have changed their mind. There have been no tangible benefits, and they weren't particularly attached to the idea.
For others it was a chance to give the establishment a kick in the balls. They were fed up with the stagnation and rot at the heart of our country. An honest assessment would have pinned the blame on conservatives that had been in power for a decade. But the EU made a convenient scapegoat for their own failings. By and large the media and politicians opposed Brexit. So the attitude was let's stick a knife in. Shake things up. I'm not convinced this group have changed their mind. Maybe some of them. But the Reform party promise to fix the whole mess (which they championed) in exchange for their votes. And I think they will get them.
For a more hardcore contingent it became an entire political identity. It's them, fighting for Britain's future, versus the "remainiacs" and the "media elite" etc who are frustrating the process. It would have worked out if people _just believed_ in it more! If we'd hard a harder Brexit. These people will never change their mind.
The politicians who told them (even for the time) quite obvious lies have not suffered any political consequences, far from it. A photo circulated on the night of Brexit where Farage was stood in front of a chart of GBP tanking while laughing. You'd think that would be his death knell! He likely shorted the pound for personal gain. Yet today he is more successful and more prominent than ever.
In short, I don't think there has been a reckoning. We are still dealing with the consequences, and likely will for a long time whether directly or indirectly
You convinced me! I wish I had multi-national committees of bureaucrats deciding what to do with the money of my countrymen, they know what's best after all
I am telling you that most of the good developments in my area - which is deprived and would not have had the funding otherwise - were through the EU regional development fund. Whatever you think of it, that is the reality.
> As an American, is that the generally-accepted viewpoint now? That Brexit was a mistake?
As a Brit who left the UK about 4 years ago but still keeps up on UK issues and news, I think this is overplayed. Sure, polls have showed the result would probably go a different way now, as it was somewhat marginal in the first place.
But the people shouting loudest about how much of a mistake it was are generally the same people who were shouting loudly about how much of a mistake it was going to be before the vote, who are (rightly or wrongly) still very bitter about it.
The generally accepted viewpoint on the ground seems to be "are we still talking about that?"
Which isn't so much an endorsement of the status quo, but a weariness of endlessly going over old ground and old battles, and general ennuis with the topic.
Politicians in the UK don't really discuss it much. The conservatives are still very pro-brexit because they own it, and because they are dancing towards the alt-right in an effort to end-run the 'Reform' party that's currently nipping at their heels (and who may as well be the UK branch of the MAGA franchise). Labour just don't want to touch it because they know that it's still divisive and they have enough other stuff to contend with. The most they're willing to say at the moment is that they would really like a better trading relationship with the EU and are pursuing closer trade deals. In the wake of Trump's tarriffs this seems to be accelerating as everyone else is scrambling to trade with whoever is more reliable than the US.
The media, AFAICT, have mostly lost interest too. The Guardian still runs some half-hearted pieces in the general direction every so often, but there's no serious 'rejoin' campaign even there. It doesn't help that many EU countries have since swung rightward and are taking anti-immigration stances now, so it's not such an obvious left-wing panacea as perhaps it once was.
The UK feels like a country in decline, and Brexit is probably a part of that, but while it casts a big shadow over everything it's not necessarily the most important problem the nation faces and it's not like there's an active political campaign to rejoin. It's been "kicked into the long grass" so to speak.
The UK public in general were never all that crazy about it, over the 47 years of membership the EU was always 'them', not 'us'. It was something that happened somewhere else, less important than local politics and local concerns. It was convenient to blame the EU when UK politicians couldn't or didn't want to fix something and needed a scapegoat. EU elections were always a sideshow with low turnout. For most it never felt like some aspirational thing, or relevant to daily life, just another layer of bureaucracy and a very remote one at that. British people were some of the least active users of freedom of movement to relocate, with more emigrating to the US, Australia and even China in recent years. It's easy to see why that created a situation where leaving was on the cards, and why the overwhelming response to it five years after leaving and almost a decade after the vote is "meh"
