In “Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy,” the political scientist Peter Mair pointed out that even political parties of the left no longer really aimed to represent people, but to govern them. Rather than champion the interests of their base to the system, they manage the integration of their base into the needs of the system, by means of trade deals, tax cuts, welfare reform and more restrictive labor laws.

“We are all Thatcherites now!” Peter Mandelson, the guru of New Labour in Britain, once declared ahead of a global gathering of “Third Way” leaders.

The result? Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour lost nearly five million votes. By 2015, soulless and bankrupt of ideas, the party was routed in the general election, and its leadership went to an obscure far-left member of Parliament.

The angry feel locked out from growth. They are. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that in Denmark, from 1975 to 2007, 90 percent of income growth went to 90 percent of the population. Contrast this with the United States, where, over the same period, more than 80 percent of income growth ended up with 10 percent of the population.

The striving middle class is pushed into the ranks of the poor as well-paying jobs, and the social mobility they bring, disappear, sometimes overseas, sometimes as a result of trade deals the establishment parties insisted were in the popular interest. Communities have been devastated, as the civic ecology on which a politics of the common good depends for most folk has been shattered: stable work on which to build a home and a family, pride in identity and place, and a network of supportive institutions and relationships cultivated across generations.

Sometimes, when I tell London friends that my working-class hometown in the northeast of England was doing better when I was growing up there in the 1960s than it is today, I see their eyes glaze over. Some even roll their eyes and tell me to stop being “prolier than thou.” Borrowing from Tony Blair, they admonish me that no one can say, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” And with that, we are back to the world of Dickens: two nations invisible to each other.

Little wonder that 58 percent of voters in northeast England supported Brexit. A left-behind working class lashed out at decades of deindustrialization, blighted communities and high levels of immigration. The elites have long dismissed those voters’ concerns about the downward pressures on wages and the strain on public services as the backward prejudices of the “bigoted,” as the former prime minister Gordon Brown was famously caught saying in an unguarded moment, as he campaigned for Labour’s re-election in 2010.