We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and everything changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately articulated in text.
The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s. Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.
Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data.
Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their dominant social status.
I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution. Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because there really isn't any solution.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-w...
The Roman Empire no longer had the will or material to support Britain and left them to their own devices against they’re will. They had no political or military systems in place to replace the Roman support.
None of this has any correlation with today.
The real question is whether and to what extent do shared identity and political structures matter in the Information Age. We're about to find out, not just in Brexit but as conservatives everywhere systematically dismantle the post-WWII order.
[1] If it accelerated at all. Again, the Dark Ages seem muddy because there's no singular historical narrative that can be articulated. Because we don't articulate a narrative, we tend to assume the period lacked an historical arc, and in particular lacked an arc of progression.
