A simple word in defense of David Cameron

I remain a supporter of Remain, for reasons I will not recap here, but I am also a realist and I recognize that a commitment to the European Union requires a substantial commitment from the population, more than a mere fifty percent and in the United Kingdom we do not see that close to that.  You probably know that the Tories seem to have won a smashing victory in today’s election, and by campaigning on Brexit as their main issue.  And you can’t just blame Corbyn — his ascendancy and leadership were endogenous to the broader process, and getting rid of him to reverse Brexit it turned out was not the priority.

So do you know who looks much better in retrospect?  Yes, David Cameron.  After the initial referendum I heard from the usual elites the notion that Cameron committed some kind of inexplicable, aberrant error by allowing the referendum in the first place.  That notion is much harder to entertain after today.  Even if you are pro-Remain, we should now see that either the referendum, or something like it, was indeed a necessary step in British politics.  Cameron himself saw this, and thought that a later referendum, run by an EU-hostile Tory government, could in fact go much worse than what he chanced.  So it seems with hindsight that Cameron was pretty prescient, even if he did not get what he wanted.