The unofficial exit polls from Britain are quite interesting because what we can reasonably conclude from them is that the people who voted to leave the EU were largely trying to roll back the 21st century, possibly all modernity (hm, sounds kinda like Isis, without the wholesale slaughter).  And this is where the parallels to Trump supporters are not strained beyond recognition.  The people who want to take out the improvements in society, besides globalism, which benefits are debatable, reacted like this was their chance to roll back the calendar to a better time when they felt they were on top of the societal food chain and their hair was thick and lustrous.

We know the olds wanted out way more than the youngs, and the poors and poorly educateds too, led the way. Conservatives were more likely to want to go. But there’s more interesting and revealing stuff here. They asked questions about certain things and whether they were a force for good or ill in society.

If you thought multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmentalism and globalism was good you wanted to stay.  But if you thought those things were bad, very very bad, you wanted to shut the doors, lock the windows, hide under the bed and ignore the EU as if it had been the cause of those movements. As if exiting the EU would bring us the UK back to 1955.

The kicker here being attitudes towards the internet.  People who thought the internet was a force for ill – perhaps they had been viciously attacked on Twitter – were almost as likely to vote leave as people who hated immigration.

I am sorry they didn’t ask about robots, but we can certainly guess how that would have turned out.

It’s not really all about economics, or even brown people, it’s at its heart about an inability to come to terms with a changing world and a shared delusion that it can be changed back.

This is a delusion certainly shared by Trump supporters on this side of the massive body of water the in crowd euphemistically calls “the pond.”

Also, kind of interesting that capitalism was split 51-49 on both sides of the debate. The economic system we are forever wed to like an old fashioned Catholic couple, isn’t  all that overwhelmingly popular anymore.  Half of us are looking around at younger, prettier, maybe more  adventurous economic systems to flirt with. There’s hope there.