David Runciman, Head of Politics Department at Cambridge
University on Western Democracies:
“The people who
voted for him did not believe they were taking a huge gamble; they simply
wished to rebuke a system on which they still rely for their basic security.
That is what the vote for Trump has in common with Brexit. By choosing to quit
the European Union, the majority of British voters may have looked as if they
were behaving with extraordinary recklessness. But in reality their behaviour
too reflected their basic trust in the political system with which they were
ostensibly so disgusted, because they believed that it was still capable of
protecting them from the consequences of their choice. …
This is where the
real risks lie. It is not possible to keep behaving like this without damaging
the basic machinery of democratic government. It takes an extraordinarily
fine-tuned political intelligence to target popular anger at the parts of the
state that need reform while leaving intact the parts that make that reform
possible.”