Italy’s Constitutional Referendum Fails, Europe Shudders

The changes were meant to make pushing through austerity and bank rescue measures simpler.* Italy’s constitution almost certainly needs changes, but it probably didn’t need these changes.

This is another rebuke to the Eurocrats and the European Union project. The populist right is rejoicing.

Jeremy Corbyn recently noted that the right is taking real grievances and offering solutions which will, at best, only paper over wounds. The left has superior solutions, but has bound itself to a dying world order because of love for internationalism. (By the left, I don’t mean most left-wing parties, like France’s socialists or England’s Labour ex-Corbyn).

Because neo-liberalism has failed, and is finally seen, clearly, to have failed, there are now only three options:

Right-Wing Populism Left-Wing Populism Police State Extension of the Current Order

That’s it. Choose your sides. Neoliberalism will only be viable if you’re willing to go full surveillance and police state.

If Trump goes in the direction Bannon desires, and which Trump has been talking up recently when he trashed China, then the neoliberal world order will be over within a year or two.

It should have ended quite some time ago, but it didn’t, and now its dismantling is going to be handled by some very unpleasant people, who, while not incompetent, do not have an ideology and policy set which can actually be expected to work out well for most people in anything more than the short run.

It is as it is.

(*As usual, the best solution would be to let the banks go under and let various people take their losses, bailing out ordinary Italians to some limited extent. Dead banks are dead banks. Let their shareholders and bondholders eat the losses.)

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