How UK could change its mind about Brexit

Will 2018 be the year when the United Kingdom changes its mind about leaving the European Union? Conventional wisdom says that stopping Brexit is impossible. But what did conventional wisdom say about Donald Trump, that he will win the US presidential election? Or that Emmanuel Macron would become the French president? Or, did it predict the original Brexit referendum? In revolutionary times, events can go from impossible to inevitable without ever passing through improbable. Brexit was such an event, and its reversal could be another.

Just ask Nigel Farage, former UK Independence Party leader, who suddenly said the June 2016 Brexit referendum could be overturned. "The 'Remain' side is making all the running", Farage warned his fellow hard-line "Leavers" this weekend. "They have a majority in parliament, and unless we get ourselves organized we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit."

The votes for Brexit and Trump are often described today as an ineluctable result of deep socioeconomic factors like inequality or globalization. But there was nothing inevitable about the specific upheavals that happened. Brexit, like Trump, was a contingent outcome of small perturbations in voter behavior. If just 1.8 percent of Britons had voted differently, Brexit would now be a forgotten joke word. If former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's popular majority of 3 million votes was distributed slightly differently among the states, the phrase "President Trump" would be as laughable today as it was in January 2016.