Boom!

As the elites of both the Left (and to a lesser extent) the Right continue to hyperventilate over Brexit, an anguished question is repeatedly posed—How could leaders throughout the West have misread the Brexit result so completely? Barack Obama got it wrong. Hillary Clinton, for all her vaunted foreign policy experience, got it wrong. The political leadership in the U.K and the EU, got it wrong. Why?

Instead of trying to fully understand why a majority of voters has rejected the lead of the elites, the Left, as it always does when it can't argue an issue rationally, descends into name calling. The far-left Guardian suggested that now "It's Okay for Britain to be Racist," and the word "xenophobia" is bandied about ad nauseum.

But let's get back to the why of Brexit and the why of the worldwide movement toward a more populist politics. It is true that uncontrolled immigration in both Europe and the United States is one of the forcing functions for a rejection of the elites. But it's a symptom, not the cause.

A significant percentage of British voters (along with the French and German electorate) viewed the immigrant flow not so much as a humanitarian crisis as a slow motion invasion that threatened the culture, the laws, and the politics of the EU. A majority of Brits wanted nothing to do with it. All of us watched the massive, uncontrolled Muslim immigrant flow out of Syria and surrounding countries and listened as European elites argued that nothing would change. We were told that these immigrants would be peaceful, even as they rioted. We were told that the millions of immigrants would integrate into European culture without any problems, even as we heard news of gang rapes in German cities and terror attacks in France and Belgium. The elites were lying to the "little people" and as events unfolded, those lies reached a tipping point.

For the last decade, the elites have learned that any event, any scandal, any social cause can be controlled through a thread of brazen lies, coupled with obfuscation and misdirection when the truth begins to surface, accusations of "partisanship" when a few brave politicians try to uncover the truth, and accusations of conspiracy theories when people get to close to the truth. Because the main stream media are the trained hamsters of the elites (on the Left), the lies can be made with impunity—no "journalist" wants to investigate an event that just might indicate that their anointed political icons are corrupt, dishonest, or venal. No media type wants to question the absolute idiocy of political correctness run amuck. So they remain silent, and a perfect storm is created.

And maybe, therein, lies an answer to the question: How could leaders throughout the West have misread the Brexit result so completely? The hard-working, tax-paying citizens of Western countries are fed up with being lied to. The result in the U.K. was a rejection of the elites—their politics, their remedies, their guidance.

Brexit was the proverbial canary in the coal mine. An explosion is coming, fueled by the elitist lies and elitist arrogance we're subjected to every day. Boom!

UPDATE: (6/30/16)
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Danniel Henninger discusses Brexit and the subsequent progressive/elite reaction by first quoting Ronald Reagan, a president who upon first running for the office was vilified, ridiculed, and dismissed by an earlier generation of 'progressives' and elites:

[Reagan said] “We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

The political values of the American and European left—heard today in every sentence spoken by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren—reside in an argument that is essentially this:

A good and just society comes through an economic and social compact between citizens and their government. If citizens will transmit sufficient tax revenue to the government, it will hire experts in public administration (to Reagan an “elite group”) who will deliver socially desirable benefits to everyone, and will do so with equity. It is an appealing promise.

People who believe this, and some still do sincerely, regarded Reagan’s inaugural formulation as the words of an antigovernment “ideologue.” Still, ideology matters, and they have their own founding ideologue, Woodrow Wilson.

The EU and in the United States, the Democrats represent the epitome of big intrusive government (BIG). At some level, the little people are beginning to recognize that the blue model that elevates BIG to the center of our political universe is a deeply flawed approach to governance. An approach that leads to massive debt, waste and abuse, economic instability, wide-spread dependency, uneven application of the law, over-regulation, intrusive violation of our family life and education, and worst of all, lies, stonewalling, and obfuscation that are used to protect BIG from charges of incompetence, fraud, vindictiveness, abuse, or the long, long list of its other failings.