SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Conlawprof and the Recent EU Elections. “Professor AAA wrote: ‘The European elections are exposing the fact that the British party system is well and truly collapsing.’ True: but why is this a bad result? A majority of the voters voted for Leave in the referendum. A majority of MPs (from both major parties) are for Remain. In those circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there would be something like a significant realignment. If there were no meaningful realignment, then democratic institutions would be a failure. It is almost as if some people despise democracy and want that precise failure as long as their preferred outcome should be preserved and their knowledge base of extant institutions should remain prized.”
Flashback: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad. “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”