The direction of history is not always towards progress. One of the reasons why I think people felt like it was safe to make a protest vote for Brexit is because in general things have gone very well for the Western world for the last fifty years. It doesn't feel that risky to throw a wrench (spanner?) into the works.
Not only have we collectively forgotten WWII, we've forgotten that we've forgotten.
We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and everything changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately articulated in text.
The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s. Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.
Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data.
Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their dominant social status.
I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution. Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because there really isn't any solution.
It's a real stretch to use "dominant social status" to refer to what they have been losing and fear losing. This suggests a misunderstanding. They don't want to be poor, dependent, useless, unsafe, or hated. The lack of that is a far cry from "dominant social status".
When you hear a person talk about something normal, it is reassuring. When you can't understand a word they say, it is threatening. They could be doing something hostile. You might say that logically this doesn't make sense, but that doesn't change the reality. Other languages are exclusionary.
Some of these cultures come with extremely unenlightened views about anybody who isn't a straight male. It's dishonest to deny this.
Your "nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution" isn't a solution even for poverty. Even in those cases when people are poor, the Brexit/Trump people don't want your handouts. They want to be useful, supporting themselves as independently as possible. They want to earn and own. They want cars and detached houses, without any sort of lease, and often they want to do their own repairs. These people don't want to be treated like children, pets, or livestock. They want to be fully in control of their own household, without government interference. Without the need to beg for government help, they want to be able to defend against intruders.
An interesting thing about the cultural war is that the Brexit/Trump people, especially the Trump people, have nowhere else to go. If they lose, their culture is wiped from the Earth. The other side can find their culture all over the world. If they lose, they can head to a typical large city elsewhere in the world.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Great Society legislation only happened because working- and middle- whites felt comfortable with their economic security.[1][2] The loss of well-paying blue collar industrial jobs may have been partly compensated with cheap domestic goods.[3] But nothing has compensated for the loss of jobs that one could reasonably expect to last for decades, if not for one's entire working life. You're not going to give on cultural issues if you feel that you're losing on the economic front. Quite the contrary, you're going to become extremely defensive and even cynical.
I'm not excusing racism and prejudice. Quite the opposite--I'm saying that it never left, its expression in popular politics only temporarily diminished.
[1] It helped that the poster children for Great Society legislation were, literally, white Appalachian children.
[2] I'm sure the same could be said for immigration in the U.K. It was tolerated or even affirmed by a working class who felt economically secure. Once they felt threatened economically by immigration, and as memories of the Empire faded along with a sense of intrinsic superiority, relatively dormant ethnic animus returned to the fore.
[3] As conservatives infamously argued during the 2016 election; that quality of life has remained undiminished or has even improved, notwithstanding stagnant wages, by pointing to A/C and refrigerator ownership rates. That's true to an extent but largely irrelevant to how people perceive equity and fairness.
Another point on this line is W.E.B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction in America", wherein he writes extensively on how post-civil war racist discourse was designed to not only persist discrimination of blacks, but to also convince poor whites that blacks were the problem, and not the rich white capitalists that were _actually_ screwing them over. So its fascinating that we see, amidst a climate of economic, social, and political uncertainty, exactly that tactic return in the election of Trump, who convinces the white working class that "he's a straight shooter", "he tells it like is", and my favorite, "he's honest" (paraphrasing CNN Presidential Election night coverage, interviewing Trump voters after his win) and pandering latent racist biases, while guaranteeing further entrenchment of the standing politico-economic order.
It shouldn't even be that hard to spot it as a culture war and not simply a class war. A trust fund billionaire absentee landlord being hailed as some sort of class war symbol of hope for the poor and working class is one of the funniest and saddest (unintentional?) political jokes perhaps of all time. It's a bizarre anti-Dadaism propping up the bourgeoise while pretending like it isn't.
