Judging by the conversations around me, I must be the only person in the world without some blazingly certain opinion on Brexit, tied into some searing unitary world view and expressible in a catchy sentence using 140 characters or less. I know what I would have voted - Remain, mostly because it seemed to make most economic sense - but I'm neither British nor a European citizen, so I can't honestly say that I've immersed myself in all the arguments or fully marshalled the range of emotions and motivations on both sides to such an extent that I'd feel confident hectoring people who don't agree with me or roundly abusing them in public.Gosh, how did everyone become such experts?Some of these folk are just South Africans like me - where did they find the time and passion to do their research?I just watched a bit of Sky News and read a couple of articles, usually written by people who share my general political orientation and so tell me things to which I'm inclined to agree, but that's not enough to make me an expert, is it?My inclinations to be a Bremaindeer are bolstered by the fact that I prefer the word "Bremaindeer" to "Brexiteer", and by the hope that I have just invented the word "Bremaindeer", plus the fact that it seems fairly indisputable that so many xenophobes and racists have lined up on the Brexit side, but then again I also know that just because the majority of racists support a cause, that doesn't mean the majority of that cause's supporters are racist.Perhaps my problem is that I'm not a sufficiently systemic thinker. I tend to try to look at each new question as a new question, rather than as a piece that can be snapped like a Lego block into some larger, theoretical worldview."That's it, Trump's definitely going to win now," said someone I know."Oh?" I said. "Why?""Because it's all about white male insecurity and the fear of immigration," they replied with an audible eye-roll, as though explaining the three-times table to a small, entitled child who hasn't been paying attention in class.This seemed odd.A British Trump might well have voted for Brexit, but it's not clear to me that all Brexiteers would have voted for Trump.It's also not clear that England is the same as the US, or that Americans are motivated by what the English do or don't.Where's the correlation between the Brexit referendum and the US election, other than in the huff and piffle of columnists spinning a catchy angle?I'd suggest there are several factors specific to the Brexit brouhaha that aren't shared by the US, not least a particular version of Englishness, a self-image that incorporates an almost stereotypical English suspicion of Europe reaching back through two world wars to Napoleon's Continental System and before.You don't have to approve of it to recognise that at least one historical strand of the English national character is the acute and defensive consciousness of being a small island, entire of itself, separate from the main, and that this weird stubborn streak of sometimes self-defeating independence runs back a long way before the current global upheavals and refugee crises.The Trump candidacy might overlap in some ways with the isolationist impulses of Brexit, but there are different dynamics at work, different anxieties and ideologies, counter-narratives and national self-conceptions.To reduce Brexit and the prospects of a Trump win to precisely the same analysis of racism and xenophobia is easy and persuasive but it comes at the cost of specificity and accuracy.Sometimes when you look too hard through one filter, all you can see is the filter.But I understand the temptation to spin grand unifying narratives. They're like conspiracy theories - even when they're enraging, they make a comforting sense.They tell us that there are big engines of history that we can apprehend and be angry about, rather than an infinite series of highly complicated and specific local situations and contexts that happen to have global consequences.If I were obsessed with the dangers of exclusionary nationalism, I might for instance make an argument comparing Brexit and Trump with the rise of our own domestic nationalism.I might point out how these various movements are premised on an obsession with identity, with questioning who belongs and who doesn't, who is or isn't a proper citizen, and using inflammatory rhetoric to unify your support by rallying it against real or imaginary Others.I might emphasise the similarities and obscure the specific differences between our rising leftist nationalism and the resurgent rightist nationalisms of the West, and it wouldn't be accurate, but if I said it loudly enough and with enough conviction, it might seem to make a sort of sense...