see themselves, and rightly so. they re the only country that wasn t occupied and invaded in the last war. they had their independence for 1,000 years and they ve suddenly realized they don t have it anymore and they want it back. yet there is no there s no back, is there? well, there is. there is, actually. you could back out of the e.u., which is the biggest free trading zone in the world. you could become immeasurably poorer, but you could have control over your destiny. what s amazing to me is my own family, for example, who are for brexit says, well, so what? we d rather be poor and free than wealthy and run by brussels. by the way, there s a lot of people that think that way right in this country as well. because people want meaning in their lives. andrew sullivan, thanks for coming on. you re always provocative and a good kind of provocative. thank you, chuck. up next, a big 2020 announcement out of texas. who is it?
cost or the glaring self-interest of its proposers, whereas nonbelievers see nothing but a deranged and costly vanity project. that s where theresa may can t figure it out. the republicans know they want the wall. she knows her people want exit from the e.u. this doesn t work. when you look at who really wants it in britain, the referendum was really close. 52/48 for profound structural change in their relationship to the world. that s a lot of up heaval. for a tiny it means that half the country is going to be outraged and enraged if you do it. theresa may understood that. she knew she could only do brexit if she had a really big majority so she went to the electorate, lost. now she s gone to her own back benches and, you know, she survived, but she really did very badly. didn t she only survive because no one else wants to do it? partly, although i think
boris johnson might be eager. other people in tory party would. she s not going to survive much longer. she s committed after the march 29th deadline for brexit. my own sense is that the country is so divided, the tory party is divided in two, the labor is divided in two, the country is divided in two. they re all inexor ran bring rolling towards this massive cliff. i think the likelihood of no deal at all is quite high. is what s happening in the u.k. a warning to the united states or a reminder, well, it will never be that bad? all of this is really a reminder to those in the political elites they have completely misjudged the mood and tenor and life experiences of the majority of people in all these countries. they want nationalism. they want the meaning that their nation gives them. they want to belong to
don t want to live their lives this way and secondly, i think, globalization kind of over reached. i mean, simple statistic. in 2015 more people immigrated to the united kingdom than immigrated in the entire period from 1066 to 1950. 37% of londoners weren t born in england. now that s a huge transformation because of the e.u., because of globalization and it has destroyed their sense of who they are. brexit is this sort of emotional response to say, we re still brittain. we re still different. we don t have to be part of this. the other thing i think is when the material prosperity runs out, and people don t even see it for their children. they think their children are going to be worse off, you realize what we don t have anymore. we don t have a religious culture to really sustain us through hard times. we don t really have those kind
joining me is andrew sullivan, new york magazine. because he has an accent, we ve decided you re an expert on western civilization. i tease. you ve spent a lot of time about u.k. politics in general. what is brexit was sort of the first shot, right, of this populus war. trump was the second shot. macron, in some ways, the rise of his election was the third shot, and yet it all seems more unstable today than it was before the brexit vote. yeah, i think what s really lying behind this, there are many things lying behind it, one is the global capitalism isn t working for most people in the west. that s as simple as that. people have stopped their living standards have failed to rise. the wealthy under global near liberal economics has grown incredibly wealthy. at some point something is going to snap. regular middle class people