In the wake of the Brexit vote, it is natural to consider what the populist victory — unexpected by elite officials and opinionmakers — might mean for elections elsewhere. Does polling underestimate Donald Trump’s true level of support? Is Trump a US equivalent of Boris Johnson? Will nationalist movements on the European continent be able to make headway too?

Certainly there are similarities, lessons, and areas of overlap. However, I believe those areas of overlap are insufficient in a critical way. The vote for UK sovereignty hinged on two separate questions: 1) Does the European Union make decisions that are good for the UK? and 2) Should the EU make decisions for the UK? Most of us at Ricochet might consider those questions indistinguishable, but the distinction is important. Some UK voters didn’t mind belonging to the EU as long as the UK continued to benefit. Others objected on principle to ceding decisions to Brussels. These are both forms of populism, but are founded on different sets of values. For years, the UK Independence Party argued against tighter integration on the basis of constitutional nationalism, and could garner only limited support. The success of the Leave movement is that its leaders formed an electoral coalition of both the pragmatic nationalists and the constitutional nationalists.