This is a shocking result. Perhaps it shouldn't have been. Many polls actually had "Leave" winning the referendum, but prediction markets ignored them and heavily favored "Remain."
There is a lot of anxiety and frustration over immigration in Britain (much more, actually, than in the US) — though it's concentrated in the areas where very few immigrants actually live.
Brexit was a generational battle. There was a close correlation between age and support for leaving, which gave many young Brits the sense that they'd been robbed of their country's future.
As for the rest ... the Google trends out of Britain are fairly alarming, and raise the distinct possibility that many Brits who either voted to leave the EU or didn't vote don't actually know what the EU is.
And then there's "Regret-xit": the people who voted to leave as an expression of dissatisfaction but didn't think their votes would matter and are now vaguely horrified that their side won.
For a scaled-up version of this, see Cornwall, whose voters strongly supported Brexit and which is already trying to find another way to keep its EU subsidies.
The first aftershock of Brexit has been political: UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who led the campaign to stay in the EU, is resigning as head of his Conservative Party and therefore as prime minister.
His most likely successor in both roles is former London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was one of the leaders of the Leave campaign (but who, on Friday, sometimes had the look of a man who hadn't realized he might actually win).
The second aftershock was financial. The pound has dropped to a 30-year low; Brexit creates a lot of uncertainty about the UK's future, and financial analysts don't like uncertainty.
What's more likely, though, is that at some point Britain will invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which sets a two-year clock for the UK and EU to negotiate terms of conscious uncoupling.
The source of anxiety for markets is what a post-EU trade deal would look like for the UK. After all, there are plenty of EU countries that would like to get some of the UK's business, and the EU has an interest in levying harsh terms on the UK to deter other defections.
The source of anxiety for the politicians like Johnson who are (likely to be) suddenly in charge of the country, meanwhile, is immigration in a post-EU UK: It turns out that the implicit promise of drastically curbing immigration is not quite as easy as they implied during the campaign.
Scotland, meanwhile — which voted down an independence referendum of its own in 2014, partly because it was afraid of leaving the EU — is already talking about another vote on secession from the UK.
And in Northern Ireland, which like Scotland voted overwhelming to stay, Sinn Fein leaders are renewing calls for reunification with still–EU member Ireland.
Economic experts agree that Brexit is going to be tremendously bad for the UK economy, other European economies, and the world economy. Like, very bad.
The future of the EU post-Brexit is murky. The vote changes internal power dynamics, giving Germany even more relative power than it already has — which no one, including Germany, wants.
What about the US? The "Brexit is just like Trumpism!" meme is compelling, but the fact of the matter is that the UK electorate simply doesn't look like the US's.
That said: It's hard to deny that right-wing populism is on the rise in the "Western world," or even globally. And it's hard to deny the conclusion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells that the vote underscores the 2010s as a time of unprecedented weakness for liberalism in rich countries.
"Amid bright paintings, multiple drum kits, piles of clothes, ball pit balls, and other odds and ends, members of the Lamont Street Collective are deciding what gets packed now and what will remain for the eviction specialists to remove. As of today, they could be kicked out at any time."
"The term 'neoliberalism' is now completely detached from any actual characteristics of an economic policy regime, and is just a sort of free floating insult tossed around by the left, attached to anything they don't like about the world."
"In 1811, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts recoiled in horror at the idea of admitting 'wild men on the Missouri' and people who 'bask in the sands on the mouth of the Mississippi' into a political union with New Englanders."
