Glad that your are trying to figure this out. I am not sure how far the Brexit analogy extends. If Bernie Sanders had won the primary and beaten Trump, no one would be making that analogy even though the same underlying Brexit motivations would have still existed. The fact remains that the Democratic establishment fronted an impossibly flawed candidate. Many of those who didn’t vote might have actually been voting for none of the above, a category that I have always wanted on American ballots.
I say beware the easy, path-of-least-resistance narrative. It short-circuits the longer, more elliptical and nuanced stories that we need to tell to really explain to ourselves how we are going to live with each other in an increasingly crowded planet. No story I heard during the election here rose to that level. Why? Because fear is so much easier and love requires hands on.
I could have told anyone who wanted to know just how disaffected rural folk are. They still are. It is the next level of disaffectiion, the one that comes when Trump voters realize that he is not going to be the raging giant of American exceptionalism that he made himself out to be, that will be the real seismic event. The pent up violence in that well is full of guns and blood and jolly well more for us ‘in country’ and for damn sure others elsewhere as we play out our happy internecine family problems on a global map. Three years in. I hope to hell I am wrong.