Anne Applebaum Meets Vox Populi And Finds It's Not a Pretty Sight

There’s a marvel of chattering-class confusion up at Slate, from Anne Applebaum (link), about the Irish rejection of them Lisbon treaty where she alternately tries (a) to scold those ungrateful bog jockeys for biting the hand that propelled them into the first division of the per capita income sweepstakes; and (b) to pontificate, knowingly, that it is the sort of thing you have to expect from voters, the poor dears, who just cannot be expected to understand what is good for them.

She doesn’t for a moment seem to consider ( c) the deeply undemocratic nature of the European Union process, top to bottom, which takes it for granted that “legitimacy” in Union affairs is an affair not of democracy but of marketing. From day one, the Union has never been about what the voters want—because, as Applebaum has learned, the voters want a lot of irrational, self-contradictory, self-deluded and deeply anti-social things. The Union has been structured the beginning as a mechanism designed (1) to recognize this fact; and (2) to steamroller the voters into taking what is good for them, whether they want it or not.

The extraordinary thing is not the Irish result, which, in the long history of the Union, counts as a huge ho hum. The Eurocrats have an unbroken track record of success at neutering this kind of popular sincerity and they’ll find a way to do it again. Bully for them, too much democracy is a frightening spectacle. But let’s not kid ourselves about what’s really afoot.