There is only one man, since liberal leader David Lloyd-George’s coalition came to power in 1918, to have won a UK-wide election while not sporting a Conservative or Labour rosette: Nigel Farage.

It is a feat the Brexit party leader is likely to claim on Sunday evening when Britain’s European election returns are counted. Many will tell you this is just a repeat performance of 2014 when Farage’s Ukip topped the UK’s European parliament poll . Don’t listen: it is not and should not be treated as such.

Leave aside the fact that Farage winning an election with a party that did not exist only months ago would be spectacular; set aside, too, the fact that he has been able to leave his old party, Ukip, a force decades in the making, barely twitching in the road. For his victory in 2019 means something different from his 2014 triumph: the scope is bigger, the ramifications probably deeper and the horse he is now riding stronger and running in a very different race.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The March to Leave the EU, from Sunderland to London, on 29 March. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Ukip was deeply and recognisably British. The half-colonels; the angry golf-playing uncles; the rankling over “elf and safety” and political correctness. Its pound-sign logo was almost quaint: It was a Britain Orwell would have recognised. Ideologically, too, its Euroscepticism mined a deep vein in British politics, tracing back to our entry in 1973, if not before.

Politics has moved on – and so has Farage. Brexit now isn’t even his principal concern, its failure the mere embodiment of a wider malaise. Instead, the collapse of the Brexit process is proof of his new analysis: that British democracy does not work and does not even exist. Worse, that every organ of the state and political life, be it the parties, the media, the courts – parliamentary democracy itself – are malign and work against the interests of “the people”. Never before have we had a major political force that operates with that basic reflex.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brexit party supporters in Chester earlier this month. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

Think of the successful entrants to the British political marketplace. The most successful of all, the Labour party, from its genesis, cherished our parliamentary institutions. It is this approach, not its advocacy of hard Brexit, that is new in our politics, and what makes the Brexit party different.

In this assumption, globally, it is not unique. People have spoken of the fear of the Americanisation (by which they really mean the Trumpification) of British politics. I followed Farage from his first rally to the last and I can assure them, it is already here. The tenor of the rallies, the rhetoric from the stage, the way the party’s messages are communicated. The bitterness, the anger, the contempt of the crowd, the boos for journalists. The crowd, young and old (often younger than you might imagine) united in believing the establishment is out to screw them and that feeling is viscerally raw. As Farage told me: “America is always a few years of us. And I’ve spent a lot of time there and I’ve learned one or two things.”

And yes, the hope, too; as hard as it might be for readers of this newspaper to believe, Farage, like Trump, for many people, represents salvation: that someone finally listens and understands. The bewilderment I suspect you feel upon reading those words betrays our Americanisation too, the importation of a culture war where the two sides have no conception of how the other conceives the world around them.

Perhaps when the Brexit party history is written, it will be appraised as a British equivalent of the Tea party

Being at those rallies, it struck me how many of my friends would listen to what they heard on the stage and the sentiment of those in the crowd and feel complete loathing and fear, at the same time as those around me cheered with joy and expectation. We no longer just disagree with each other, we don’t even begin to understand how our fellow citizens think.

For those who greet this US political turn with dismay, I have even worse news. For I wonder if another parallel is yet to play out. Perhaps when the history of this period is written, it will not be a story of the Brexit party breaking the traditional duopoly in Westminster (though that possibility cannot be discounted) but rather be appraised as a British equivalent of the Tea Party, which did so much to subvert and change traditional Republicanism; which prepared the way for a Trump takeover of the GOP.

For Brexit party success will surely change the alchemy of the Tory makeup. Indeed, it already has, setting the seal on the end of Theresa May’s premiership and ensuring the all-but-certain election of a no-dealer in her stead. Far from a Conservative turn to the kind of broad, centrist Christian democracy to which Theresa May once aspired, her party may follow the Republicans in becoming a hard-edged populist movement. In an age where “one-nation” seems impossible and where we are at least two, Farage and his success will force them to choose. Out of fear, they will choose him.

Lewis Goodall’s 40 Days of Farage: A New Populism? is on the Sky News website