I am enjoying the tantrum of Britain’s elites as much as anyone. From listening to the BBC on the radio, it seems like Britain’s fanatically pro-EU elites are building an alternative universe where they ignore survey research that shows little support for a second referendum, and instead focus obsessively on anecdotal stories about Leave voters begging forgiveness from bankers and professors. Forgive them oh Chancellor Merkel, for they know not what they have done. And yet, smarter Leave politicians like Boris Johnson are focusing on winning over soft supporters of Remain to a politics of British sovereignty.

The necessity of doing this is partly obscured by the sheer ugliness of the reaction from Remain’s elite supporters. As far as I can tell, their response is based on three (sometimes unspoken propositions. The first is that the majority of the British are semi-human racists and morons who cannot die quickly enough. The second is that the United Kingdom should be dissolved as quickly as possible so that it can become the cosmopolitan playpen of their dreams. The third proposition is that these elites should continue to be top dogs over the people they hate and the country they wish to abolish. How could anyone avoid luxuriating in schadenfreude when reading these people publicly make monsters and fools of themselves?

Politicians like Boris Johnson seem to understand that the vast majority of that 48 percent who voted to stay part of the EU were not elites. They were not City of London bankers or BBC journalists. Many of that 48 percent were not even hard core Scottish or Irish nationalists. Many of the Remain voters were economically anxious about life outside of the EU. Many were worried that UK patriotism was a form of civic rank-pulling about who is a real Briton. One can imagine that a perfectly reasonable person would prefer to be a first-class subject of Brussels, rather than a second-class citizen of the UK.

The maintenance of a sustainably sovereign UK is going to be dependent on winning over some of the soft Remain vote to democratic and accountable politics. It will also mean reassuring them that they will be as authentically and equally British as any other citizen. This newspaper article is a good start.

Of course, all this also has implications for American conservatives who want to build a broad-based populist movement.