with less than two weeks to go before the u.s. election, comparisons to britain<u+2019>s brexit revolt are proliferating. be not afraid if the polls look bad, brexiteers console despondent supporters of donald trump. both elections are activating populist uprisings, the theory goes, and that swell of disdain for the ruling class may boggle the pollsters in america the way it caught british pundits off guard. maybe. the more interesting brexit lesson for the trumpians, though, concerns what comes after the election, whether mr. trump wins or loses. you say you want a revolution<u+2014>and some conservative leaders in america seem to imagine the trump revolution will pave the way for dramatic policy changes they<u+2019>ve wanted for years. think tax and regulatory reform, or energy liberalization, or the supreme court. how<u+2019>s that working out in britain? it<u+2019>s not. those free-market tories who thought they could ride the popular brexit wave to radical economic liberalization are discovering the voters have other ideas. one could list all the ways britain already is failing to live up to the promise some saw in brexit. the fact that says it all is that brexit triggered the ouster of david cameron, who for all his flaws had pursued tax cuts, budget discipline and some entitlement reforms. the tories then eschewed classical liberals such as michael gove and instead have installed a german-style christian democrat as prime minister in the form of theresa may. and she seems to be pretty popular. now these <u+201c>reform brexiteers<u+201d> fret that their popular revolution is being stolen from them by, well, take your pick. so-called hard brexit could see britain lose any preferential access at all to the european single market in exchange for imposing economically ruinous immigration controls<u+2014>not exactly the free-market dream. or mrs. may could blow it by not going bold enough on the liberalizations to trade, tax, energy, product markets and the like that britain needs to succeed outside the eu. or shifty elites could steal brexit from the voters entirely if the process is subjected to a parliamentary vote, where a majority of pro-eu members of parliament would scuttle it. this disappointment is the elite brexiteers<u+2019> own fault. the error was to think that brexit was about building a better britain. instead it was about tearing something apart. brexit was a no, just as it said on the ballot papers. it was a no to a political elite that seemed out of touch, or to an economy that has grown imbalanced in favor of london and financial services at the expense of the rest of the country and manufacturing. who knows what britain will be prepared to say yes to instead. that<u+2019>s normally what politics is supposed to be about<u+2014>an iterative process through which voters who know what they don<u+2019>t want wrangle about what they<u+2019>ll grudgingly consent to. for the moment we appear to be putting normal politics on hold in favor of grand rejections that elide the inevitable <u+201c>and then?<u+201d>. maybe you can argue a resounding electoral no clears out the underbrush to facilitate better choices later on. but experience is showing this doesn<u+2019>t happen quickly, and while politicians squabble about the meaning of these revolt votes, reformers lose opportunities to persuade voters to say yes to their program. that<u+2019>s something many american conservatives appear to have missed in their rush to support mr. trump as a vector, no matter how flawed, for reform and revitalization. he<u+2019>s the ultimate no candidate: no to crooked hillary, no to free trade, no to immigrants, no to an economy that works for coastal tech start-ups but not for midwest manufacturers, no to political correctness or even common decency, no to the media, no to republican elites, no to washington, no to national decline. some of those things are worth saying no to, others aren<u+2019>t. but don<u+2019>t mistake any of this for a yes to anything like tax cuts or entitlement reform, whatever mr. trump says on the rare occasions when he manages to spit out a policy point. mr. trump<u+2019>s rise, like brexit, is a popular revolution that is philosophically coherent in its way but operationally implausible once you notice that a long list of nos doesn<u+2019>t amount to a governing to-do list. that should inform republicans inclined to vote for mr. trump in the hope that once in office he<u+2019>ll support a supply-side agenda, or inclined to worry that mrs. clinton would be appreciably worse. they can take comfort from the realization that the democrats will confront the same problem after a clinton victory. her campaign has become merely a big no to mr. trump rather than a case for her own agenda. the lesson from brexit is that it really doesn<u+2019>t matter so long as voters aren<u+2019>t yet in a yes mood.
brexit, trump and a whole lot of no - wsj
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