Matt Levine, Columnist

Votes, Mortgages and Mackerel

December 5, 2016 at 2:17 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Italy.

The recurring story of Western democracies in 2016 has been one of elites asking the people to weigh in on subtle and complex structural issues in the form of a wildly oversimplified binary question, and the people giving the "wrong" answer, and then everyone trying to figure out what that means. Brexit means Brexit, but is it a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit or what? Donald Trump will be the president, but will he be populist Trump or Secret Trump or Wall Street Trump or what?