I pose to you these questions: if you’re unhappy and you’re offered two options, one of which is to guarantee that you continue in your unhappiness, and the other of which is to offer you uncertainty but some vague possibility of increased happiness … what do you do? You’re in a dungeon, in shackles, and an obvious fraud – a charlatan – comes and says, “I can show you a better life, believe me,” what do you do?

Don’t answer too quickly, but think back a couple of weeks: it seemed that no one in their right mind thought Brexit would pass, but it did. And it did because anyone with a gripe, from both the so-called right and the so-called left, voted Leave. If you are disgruntled, for whatever reason – because you hate migrants, because you have no job or you have to wait for a text offering you day work, because you want a better life, because National Health doesn’t work for you and those promoting “Leave” promised more money for it, because you’re sick of Europe being run by bankers – you voted Leave.

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It was a referendum, and voting “Leave” was a protest; voting “Remain” was a lukewarm endorsement of the status quo.

What if, in America, the 2016 presidential election is a referendum on the status quo? I mean, do you know anyone who wants things to stay the way they are? Everyone wants either progress or a return to the fictional “way things used to be”.

This is why Bernie Sanders might have been a better choice for the Democrats than Hillary Clinton. It’s not that he’s so much more principled (although I think he probably is) or that he’d make a so much better president (he probably would not), or that Clinton is or “evil” or “corrupt”. I don’t know her, but I believe she’s a good person (and a much better person than her husband).

She’s certainly the best possible next president, as everyone from Obama to Michael Bloomberg has been lining up to say at the DNC all week. But she’s also certainly a representative of the global capitalist status quo; she is campaigning for a pro-business, pro-markets, essentially anti-working-class system. She won’t talk about this, just as aw-shucks Biden and neither of the glorious Obamas would talk about it; like them, she’ll talk about “America”. Which, for a minority of us, is a pretty privileged place.

But where are her new ideas for making life better for people who feel exploited? What is she saying about taking back this country, not from the immigrants (a ridiculous notion in a country almost entirely composed of immigrants and their descendants) but from an economy of theft and extraction and transfer from the poor to the rich?

What if I’m afraid, not of a terrorist attack – only marginally more likely than a personal lightning strike – but of an impoverished old age or a house foreclosure, or simply of my car breaking down and not having enough money to fix it? For too many Americans, these are real fears, and Hillary represents the class responsible for causing them.

This may make it hard for many people to pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. Even though, yes, of course, logically, you should; she’s the only candidate who might make things better. But she is also the candidate of the gruntled, if there is such a word.

Few Americans have heard of Arron Banks, a backer of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence party (Ukip) and a founder of the leave.eu campaign. Here he is, talking to the Guardian about consultants’ advice to hone the message of the Brexit campaign: “It was taking an American-style media approach … What they said early on was ‘facts don’t work’ … You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

It made no sense for the UK to leave the EU, just as it makes no sense for anyone to vote for Donald Trump: he won’t make life better, or safer, or more profitable or moral or peaceful, for anyone but himself and a few cronies.

But to choose his name on a ballot as a protest vote? As a way to say, “This system, as it stands, doesn’t work for me?” As a way to say, “This system stinks, so let me show you that I fervently believe that, even if it’s not in my so-called self-interest, because the status quo is surely not in my self-interest, and maybe some change is better than none?”

As a way to say, “I feel like I’m in shackles, and maybe this man is the way out? Because that woman definitely is not?”

That’s the thinking that brought us Brexit. And that scares the bejesus out of me.