PBS NewsHour is generally pretty staid stuff — like Ambien but less habit-forming. Election night, however, was something else. As the evening wore on, and the pundits succumbed to quiet bafflement, or barely concealed panic, the conversation became punctuated by awkward pauses and murmurs. Searching for a toehold, co-host Judy Woodruff asked Amy Walters whether Trump’s victory wasn’t similar to Brexit — both because despite close last-minute polls, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union was a shock, and because Trump himself had promised “more Brexit” for the United States.

The Brexit analogy was Woodruff trying to make sense of an event we were assured wouldn’t happen, akin for many liberals to the rogue gas planet colliding with Earth in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. She wasn’t alone. Many saw Brexit as a bellwether of the growing global discontent with elites, “globalism,” and the political status quo — a feeling confirmed by Trump’s victory.

In a NewsHour conversation over the summer, David Brooks and Mark Shields discussed this very topic. Brooks observed that “in country after country, we’re seeing a conflict between what you might call urban cosmopolitans and less well-educated ethnic nationalism, and ethnic nationalism is on the rise.”