There is much wrong here, and quite a bit wrong there where you are.
What I dislike the most about Brexit is that xenophobia won the day. British folks were getting very upset with the invasion of others, and so they decided to exit the EU. I am not calling it by any other name: xenophobia. Where many other nations cannot close their doors to strangers and experience neo-fascism when certain parts of the population gets disgruntled, the Brits just closed their doors. There, done! No more influx we don't want (and experiencing quite the outflow as we speak).
The deeper problems stem from the Anglo system that we inherited here in the US. We have this old fashioned winner-take-all system and that leaves many people unrepresented.
Minorities do not pick the winner. Only the majority gets to pick the winner.
As a result, the largest group of voters ends up getting no representation. That's right. The two other groups are smaller, but these two groups do get their representatives.
https://medium.com/the-national-discussion/and-the-winner-is-the-losing-party-c683c1d739e5
Still, we are more troubled than the Brits, because we have an empowered monarch we call the president and switch regularly. We should have taken a cue from the Norse people because the Scandinavians are the happiest people on the planet and they have just a single House with full representation. No surprise therefore that they are the happiest. Their voters are in full control.
We have three institutions we vote for and that subsequently bicker with one another: House, Senate and Presidency. Our own vote can fight with our other own votes.
The UK is smarter in that the House of Parliament is where most of the action takes place, not being disrespectful for the House of Lords, but they mostly play second fiddle, sometimes with much noise. That is smart. And once every 100 years the UK has a coalition government. Too little to make a real impact, but still, it will give the citizens hope they can always go elsewhere, collectively that is, because the individual vote only counts toward the collective outcome; it has no value otherwise.
When I first came to the US, I realized quickly that the distance between people was greater here than in England (and definitively where I am from) because race was yet another 'separator' in society. The winner-take-all system is a system that is based on competition; it is not based on cooperation. Very much like the Hunger Games the tribes are set up against one another. In England that is class society, the worst one can find in Western Europe. And like the Hunger Games there is actually a thirteenth tribe that does not play along, but enjoys the games from a safe distance.
The real annoying aspect about winner-take-all is that 'thirteenth tribe,' that upper crust, the elite. They can partake or not in our 'democracy' but it really doesn't matter. They are never hurt; they are never in the thick of it. They always win. Our 'democracy' is really just for the battles between the tribes, not for the elite.
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There you have it. The folks in the United States are fed up with our politicians, left and right are unhappy and they have been unhappy for decades. We've been told to compete and compete and compete and then the reward would be there. And when the reward doesn't show up, we're told we didn't compete enough.
The Red and the Blue are yellow. They are afraid to give us a real democracy. But the USA 2.0 upgrade will come. It is actually very easy at the local level, a good start.
But first we need to ensure that the Blue folks stop being angry with the Red folks and vice versa. Telling what is wrong with the other group does not mean the overall setup isn't wrong at the same time as well. These are the Hunger Games. Maybe they'll show up on the British doorsteps, too, when the economy keeps slipping there.
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I believe it was a Brit who said the following a long time ago:
"Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities."
—John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861
