There are a lot of clues about the future of American politics hidden within the outcome of Thursday's election in the United Kingdom. Few people can see them because few are looking. They'd rather twist the results to fit their preconceptions, the most important of which involves voters throwing temper tantrums.

It started with President Donald Trump, whose election is widely regarded as the latest incarnation of the "angry white male" scenario first concocted by the left to explain why the Republicans ran the table in the 1994 election, winning control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The elites still see Trump's victory in 2016 as an expression of the rage working-class voters in industrial states carry around with them because over three decades liberal Democratic policies have chased jobs out of America. The see nothing good about it, just as they saw nothing good about the Gingrich-led takeover of Congress, despite the fact the 1994 GOP platform – the Contract with America – was a uniformly positive document promising reform and redress of issues that had for too long been neglected.

Editorial Cartoons on Brexit View All 24 Images

These same elites continue to tell us the first vote on Brexit was the product of similar fears and doubts to what they argue is now present in American politics. The folks who voted to take the U.K. out of the EU, they tell us, did so because they became fed up with the flood of foreigners diluting the homeland.

The data say otherwise. Post-election surveys showed the real motivator for the pro-exit voter was what had risen to an intolerable disgust at the number of laws and regulations being made in Brussels to which the Brits had to bow.

The same people who continue to get that wrong want us to believe the results of Thursday's election are a demonstration of buyer's remorse. They couldn't be more wrong.

The Tory lead in the polls only began to collapse after both major parties had released their manifestos. In her bid for a big win, Prime Minister Theresa May became greedy, bidding for the votes of the disaffected among the Labour Party and the UK Independence Party with promises that were not only not Thatcherite, but could only in jest be called conservative. Among her sins, she abandoned the Cameron-era pledge not to raise income tax rates, attacked job creators, talked of putting workers on corporate boards, committed an additional 8 billion pounds into the failing National Health Service without reform and promised to cap household energy prices.

What she and the folks who wrote the manifesto for her forgot was Britain already has a left-wing, anti-corporate party committed to raising taxes and preserving the National Health Service. It's called Labour and, as the saying goes, why go for left-wing light when you can have the real thing? If the election was really a kind of "un-Brexit," the two parties most openly opposed to it – the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalist Party – would have picked up seats. They didn't.

In an attempt to have it all, May moved the Tories too far to the left. This should be a cautionary tale for all the so-called conservative commentators in the United States who, since President Ronald Reagan, have been counseling the need for the right to become more generous, to take off its hard edge, to moderate and modernize its views. As a strategy for winning elections, it doesn't work.

Trump won where Dole, McCain, Romney and even Bush didn't because he talked tough about trade, job creation, tax cuts and doing something about the problems created by politicians who consistently over-promise things the permanent government can only under-deliver. He tapped the same chord Reagan did when he said "government is too big and it spends too much" – something that is even truer today than it was when Reagan ran for president in 1980.

Issues change. The values and basic principles that define us rarely do. Right-wing social engineering, as former Speaker Newt Gingrich once said, is no better than left–wing social engineering. Freedom works. The modernizers and moderators don't get that and probably never will. The American people do.