British voters have voted to leave the EU. What a waste. I’m skeptical that this will cause economic Armageddon, but I doubt that it will do Britain any good either. Now they’ll spend the next three or four years up to their gills in rancorous negotiations on the terms for exit, and all to accomplish next to nothing.
In the short term, however, everyone is going to freak out. Financial markets are already throwing a fit, with the pound absolutely cratering. It had strengthened earlier in the week as it looked like Brexit would lose, but earlier tonight, as the first results started trickling in, it dropped like a stone. It 
lost more than 10 percent of its value in just a few hours, and is now trading at it lowest level against the dollar in 30 years.
I don’t have any personal axe to grind on Brexit. Except for one: I am sick and tired of watching folks like Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and others appeal to the worst racial instincts of our species, only to be shushed by folks telling me that it’s not really racism driving their popularity. It’s economic angst. It’s regular folks tired of being spurned by out-of-touch elites. It’s a natural anxiety over rapid cultural change.
Maybe it’s all those things. But at its core, it’s the last stand of old people who have been frightened to death by cynical right-wing media empires and the demagogues who enable them—all of whom have based their appeals on racism as overt as anything we’ve seen in decades. It’s loathsome beyond belief, and not something I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. But that’s where we are.
