In 1950, a young parliamentary candidate named Margaret H Roberts made a big promise to voters. Her country, the 24-year old political newcomer complained, had become weak: its economy was in tatters, its government too hesitant to exercise its might abroad. After years of decline under a Labour government, it was "time to make Great Britain great again".
In style or substance, the future Margaret Thatcher was nothing like Donald Trump. Mr Trump proudly breaks all rules of good behaviour; Thatcher insisted on the civilising power of social convention. Mr Trump is an ideological iconoclast, always willing to follow the lowest instincts of his supporters; Thatcher was a committed conservative who aimed to advance her principles.
But it is no mere historical oddity that they wound up with much the same slogan. It neatly encapsulates a trait that unites many right-wing politicians who are otherwise dissimilar: They not only share the nationalist belief that their country is marked for greatness -- but also the visceral fear that it is under threat from internal traitors and external enemies.
This fear is especially powerful among populist insurgents who have attacked the conservative establishment in some countries. Mr Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France all fervently believe that solutions are simple and that, so long as the pure voice of the people prevails, the reasons for popular discontent will quickly vanish.
If the political problems of our time are so easy to fix, why do they persist? Since the populists are unwilling to brook the idea that the real world might be complicated, they need somebody to blame.
So Mr Trump blames the United States' economic problems on China and other countries, and preys on fears by claiming that the US is being overrun by dangerous rapists (Mexicans) and terrorists (Muslims). European populists see their enemies elsewhere, and tend to express their bile in a more circumspect manner. But their rhetoric has the same logic. Like Mr Trump, Ms Le Pen and Mr Farage believe that it must be the fault of outsiders -- of Muslim moochers, Polish plumbers, or Brussels bureaucrats -- if ordinary people feel that their incomes are stagnating.
To preserve the idea that it would be easy for somebody with the right intentions to make all the difference, populists need to supplement their fear-mongering about external enemies with wrath at internal traitors. People in the establishment, populists of all stripes argue, are either in it for themselves, or in cahoots with the nation's enemies. Establishment politicians have a misguided fetish for diversity. Or they naively bought into the European ideal. Or -- simplest explanation of all -- they are secretly Muslim.
There are two logical implications of this worldview. First, an honest political leader needs to take office -- one who shares the simple, pure outlook of the people. Second, this leader must abolish the institutional roadblocks that prevent him from implementing the pure will of the people.
Liberal democracies are full of inconvenient checks and balances But in the imagination of the populists, the will of the people does not need to be mediated, and any compromise with minorities is a form of corruption. In that sense, populists are deeply democratic: Much more fervently than traditional politicians, they believe that the demos should rule. But they are also deeply illiberal: unlike traditional politicians, they openly say that neither individual rights nor institutional norms should stand in the people's way.
The Euroscepticism that animates today's "Leave" campaign in the UK referendum on EU membership is, in some ways, the least pernicious form of populism. Its declared enemies are comfortable bureaucrats in Brussels, not the Syrian refugees next door. Nor is the solution they seek the stuff of nightmares. Instead of dismantling civil rights and independent courts those advocating for the so-called "Brexit" seek to leave a supranational organisation that, for all of its many achievements, really does have a significant democratic deficit.
Eurosceptics desire a true moment of democratic reckoning, which finally allows the will of the British people to reign supreme. But that is too much to ask from a "Brexit". For, even once the UK is liberated from pesky regulations about the contents of British sausages, the pure will of the people will remain constrained. With no Eurocrats left to blame for the fact that liberal democracy requires the slow boring of hard boards, they will have to identify a new lot of feeble people they need to overcome to "make Great Britain great again". ©2016 Zocalo Public Square
Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University and a Carnegie Fellow at New America. This essay is part of Will the UK Divorce Europe Yet Again?, a project of Zócalo Public Square.