A Complete Rejection of the Establishment

Dan Balz: “Here’s one example of a connection between what happened in Britain and the rise of Trump in the United States: In Britain, nearly the entire political establishment was aligned in favor of staying in the European Union. The ‘remain’ campaign was in some measure an effort by these political elites to scare rank-and-file voters with dire forecasts about what a post-Brexit economy might look like that included threats of spending cuts and higher taxes.”

“But when voters went to the polls, in a huge turnout, they either weren’t afraid of those forecasts or didn’t believe what they had heard because they had given up on the political leaders of their country. In either case, it was an explicit rejection of what they were being told and an embrace of their own instincts and personal experiences.”