The New Aristocary

Mark Steyn writes about an earlier referendum, with a point that's still relevant today:

This was an important victory for western society's real silent majority: those people who dissent from the notion that career politicians should carve up all the most visible offices of state for themselves. Some of this silent majority are monarchists; some believe in a directly elected president; a large proportion are just average contented folks who aren't obsessed about politics. But they have far more to bind them to each other than they do to the establishment republicans who believe that the presidency should be just one more gift in the ruling party's box of baubles. If Australian voters tell us anything, it's that a political state isn't enough. At heart, most of us are romantic enough to demand more — either the mystique of monarchy or the rawer form of democratic politics in which a man must embark on his campaign to win the presidency by pressing the flesh in the Elks Lodge. Constitutional monarchy and a US-style presidency don't have much in common — except insofar as, either way, you find yourself sitting next to me come early November — but both speak to something larger in a nation's sense of itself.

Exactly. All this talk of a 'United States of Europe' is giving them too much credit. No self-respecting Eurocrat would ever stoop to pressing the flesh with the common rabble. The whole ethos of the EU is that everything is the gift of the political class.

This is the one big advantage the Remoaners have over Leave campaigners. Leave voters in 2016 were happy that they won, then they went back to real life. Remoaners recognised their defeat as the beginning of the end. Look at who the lead Remoaners are: people like Alistair Campbell, Lord Adonis, Gary Lineker.... aka the Great Unelected, people who have never gone within a country mile of a ballot paper, but nevertheless made out like bandits.

To the point: some people favour small government, some support big government but - as evidenced by the Remoaners reliance on Project Fear atrocity stories - there's no constituency for government as a combined ATM and full employment service for members of the snoot class.