We conclude this week’s preview of the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) with CRB contributing editor Christopher Caldwell’s essay “Why hasn’t Brexit happened?”
I selected this essay because Caldwell’s exposition helped me understand the ordeal that has convulsed British politics. In their ever more brazen efforts to undo the democratic vote in favor of independence from the European Union, British elites have shown themselves loyal to bureaucrats in Brussels over their own countrymen. Caldwell writes: “Brexit clarifies the constitutional stakes for the world as nothing else.”
Caldwell’s CRB essay can usefully be supplemented by Caldwell’s Spectator (UK) essay earlier this month: “Europeans have started to change their minds on Brexit.” Like his essays on Brexit, Caldwell’s essay “The coming migration out of sub-Saharan Africa,” in the current National Review, puts his great gifts on display.
One cannot help but learn from him. Caldwell is an expert on European politics and much else as well as a pleasure to read. He is a lucid stylist. His Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009) remains essential reading. His new book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, is forthcoming this January.
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