The end of the world: We tease the idea here in the opinions section every now and again. Like in our opening editorial of Summer A and C—we mentioned an apocalypse was sure to come because Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out of the Republican presidential primary. Well, here’s the thing: We may have cried wolf a little bit.
Put it this way, things have gotten so bad that Lionel Messi says he’s retiring from Argentina's soccer team. Messi! This is the man who is to soccer as Jeb Bush is to losing presidential elections. What’s next? Is Leonardo DiCaprio destined to spend another lifetime just to get another Oscar? (#PrayforLeo)
And our political news is even worse. Just look at this Brexit situation. Europe and Great Britain: America’s parents are getting divorced.
The time for panic may come, but this isn’t a certainty. Sure, Mom and Dad have been arguing, and they’ve threatened the household with divorce since October. They even slept in different bedrooms last night. But have they filed the paperwork and actually laid out a plan to live separately? No.
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which assigns a firm two-year deadline to negotiations for a country’s divorce from the EU, has yet to be invoked by the U.K. And when Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the Brexit vote by announcing his resignation come October, he said, “I think it is right that this new prime minister take the decision about when to trigger article 50 and start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU.”
So, the soonest anything will officially happen is October. Moreover, as The Intercept reported, when prominent Leave campaigner Boris Johnson joined the Leave campaign in February, he argued, “There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says ‘No.’”
Such language, coupled with Johnson’s recent “No-need-for-haste” rhetoric after the Brexit vote, suggests the campaign was designed more as a bluff, a negotiating tool for the U.K.
All this to say: we shouldn’t panic because nothing is set in stone. What we should do is get ready for a clusterfuck of emotions, legalease, cat fighting and passive aggressive stalemates… not all that different from an actual divorce. Or having your annoying roommate spoil the most recent “Game of Thrones” episode.
Brexit wasn’t the only bad news for American politics. On Friday, members of the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee voted on a series of amendments to the platform. If Brexit was Britain moving to divorce the EU, these voting outcomes were the Democratic Party’s move to divorce Progressive values.
Voting down a series of proposals by Bernie Sanders’ appointees, the committee failed to reject the TPP—a trade pact that Hillary Clinton denounced in rhetoric during the primary but supported avidly as secretary of state. The committee also opposed $15 minimum wage indexed at inflation, refused to acknowledge Israeli occupation of Palestine, opposed a carbon tax and rejected a national moratorium on fracking.
In fairness, the committee did vote in favor of reapplying Glass-Steagall and rejected the death penalty, which are both fantastic proposals for progressives.
But with how this platform stands overall, it seems we should make preparations to host a vigil for Clinton as, “the progressive who likes to get things done,” and instead, ready ourselves for an ugly, mind-numbing general election between a monster and a centrist Republican disguised as a Democrat.
