Could there have been bona fide reasons for Brexit? Not if you believe Joy Reid. On her MSNBC show today, Reid suggested that old and rural voters, who tended to vote Leave, had “hijacked the future of the young.”
She also blamed voter discontent on Prime Minister David Cameron’s “austerity” program. Guess Reid reckons that people would have been happier with a UK that looked like Greece. Ron Insana chimed in to suggest that older voters were “re-romanticizing” their past, leading Reid to see a symmetry with Trump campaign, which she claims is being driven by the “nostalgia voter.”
Apparently it hasn’t occurred to Reid that far from “hijacking” the future of the young, older and perhaps wiser voters are trying to save the young from an impoverished future of increasingly burdensome and distant regulation and a country overrun by low-skill, unassimilated immigrants.
JOY REID: Bill, we also know there was a youth versus older people split. There was a sort of rural versus urban split. And now we find out that there is a referendum petition that’s going around by people who regret their vote to leave. 1.5 million people and counting. Is there now a generational sort of fight going on between Britons as to whether or not older voters and rural voters have in a sense hijacked the future of the young?BILL NEELY: Very much so. I’ll give a personal example. My daughter is 18, she voted to Remain, like most of her friends. And she says on social media, on the kinds of social media they use, it is full of people saying that the old, their parents’ generation, grandparents’ generation, has robbed them of their future. They feel very, very resentful.. . .RON INSANA: There is also, when you look at the demographics, older folks, and I’m paraphrasing a quote I saw on one of the social media sites this morning, are re-romanticizing their past, they’re trying to recreate something that is now gone to the detriment of the youth of their country.REID: That’s amazing, because the nostalgia voter is what’s driving the Donald Trump campaign here. So interesting, the symmetry. Kim Ghattas, to what extent is what’s happening in England right now a result of the austerity that was, let’s be honest, put in place by the Cameron administration which was voted back into power even after he had done it after the great recession.KIM GHATTAS: That’s what’s so amazing when we look at the results of this referendum. The indictment that it is of David Cameron himself who has had to resign and is now being pushed out even faster by the EU who are saying you have got to leave even more quickly than you said you would.
Yeah, those “nostalgia voters” . . . .
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