Comment by dspillett

12 days ago

> but 2/3rds of 330 million people is not 75 million votes

It was a remembered stat, and there were more than 75,000,000 who “either directly voted for it or sat on their elbows and let it happen”.

A quick check of official stats:

    The turnout of 64.1% and 49.1%/49.3%/1.9% “of the vote” figures means:
    ~32% rep
    ~31% dem
    ~ 1% other
    ~36% did not vote

So 68% voted for it or sat on their elbows. Pretty close to my half-remembered two thirds.

> it's not like Europe hasn't had it's fair share of bullshit and far right parties.

True, and they are worryingly gaining ground in a number of places (here in the UK for one), but the whole EU (or Europe, or the EEA, depending on the exact set of countries we want to include in the pot for this discussion) has never been close to far-right in that time.

> That then the US and Europe can be more equal partners than before this monster of an individual

Eventually, hopefully. We'll see what happens in a couple of years. But the trust won't come back overnight even from where it is now, and there is plenty of time for the situation to get worse. I expect it will take a couple of terms at the very least for things to even out close to where they were before, if they ever do.

And for all the claims of “defending democracy and the free world”, the unilateral arseholery in general and active threats to other democracies (the EU overall, its individual states, and non-EU states), gives other regimes a loverly big mess to point at while asking “Do you really want democracy?”, so it might not even be possible for things to revert over that timescale because of the changes in balance elsewhere as less direct consequence.

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dspillett

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TeMPOraL  12 days ago

The biggest problem here isn't the numbers, but the usual manipulative rhetoric of putting people who "voted for it" and those who "sat on their elbows" into the same bucket, to vilify them together.

I'll skip the philosophical argument for the absurdity of this view in general, because the numbers you provided speak even louder. Consider that both big parties got pretty much the same amount of votes[0] - so whether or not the 36% of population who didn't vote are seen as complicit villains, depended on how a different 0.5% of the population (or 0.15% of the voters) voted!

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[0] - I'd argue that 0.2% difference is within margin of statistical error, but that's a whole other discussion.

  • dspillett  12 days ago

    > so whether or not the 36% of population who didn't vote are seen as complicit villains

    Not complicit villains, it isn't as black and white as that, but those who don't engage and then complain are pretty close. After the brexit vote a number of people said things along the lines of “if I'd know it would matter, I'd have bothered”, which is something I find difficult to respond to in a polite manner.