Symbolically and rhetorically, Mrs. May’s campaign message is simple and overpowering. While opposition parties dirty their hands with policy ideas and news conferences, she is seeking to personify the nation state itself — a job that technically belongs to the queen. In one of her campaign videos, which sees her speaking solemnly in front of a Union Jack in a dimly lit room as if announcing a new war, she uses the term “us” in multiple ways: At times it means the Conservative Party, at others it means the government, and at other times it means Britain itself. The mesmerizing effect on the viewer is to lose track of the differences among the three. Representative democracy is being denigrated as petty and harmful to the national interest by a woman who has just called an unnecessary and unwanted election.

Where does this leave the opposition? The fear is that outside of Scotland, rival political parties will be reduced to the status of glorified think tanks or nongovernmental organizations. If they come up with good ideas, Mrs. May’s government can happily adopt them. Already, the Conservatives have picked up one popular Labour Party policy for controlling the retail price of energy. With the Conservatives branded as more than just a political party, it is hard to see how their electoral stranglehold over England and Wales will be broken.

Politicians and parties can scarcely be blamed for wanting more power. That’s what drives them. What is worrying about Mrs. May is that she seems to be deliberately aggravating Britain’s existential anxiety, precisely so as to benefit from it personally. Her extraordinary Trumpian accusation that European Union leaders are seeking to interfere in the election (since repeated by other Conservative ministers) seems to be aimed at stoking nationalist resentment toward the very people who will end up deciding what type of trade deals and “divorce bill” Britain will be granted. This suggests that she views the destruction of the Labour Party as a more important national priority than Britain’s long-term economic prosperity.

Mrs. May clearly has a good emotional antenna, especially when it comes to sensing the fears and resentments of what she calls “ordinary working people.” But if it turns out that she is a weak negotiator with the European Union, and if she fails to grasp the magnitude of Britain’s economic vulnerability, the politics of resentment will be all she has to fall back on. Britain’s conservative tabloid press will praise every step in this direction with its usual wartime nostalgia, and she will continue to claim the support of “the people.” But the reality will be a fractured nation slipping ungraciously to the status of an angry and irrelevant midsize economy.

Brexit will be fiendishly difficult, but there is no reason it has to be draped in so much nationalistic gravitas and secrecy, nor does it have to mean the hugely risky departure from the European single market. But that’s the path that Mrs. May has chosen. Her gambit is to present herself and the Conservative Party as the one certainty in an otherwise chaotic political situation, with party politics a symptom of weakness and chaos. This is likely to work to devastating effect, but only because she refuses to acknowledge the crucial contribution that she and her party made to this chaos in the first place.