While there are some who have drawn certain parallels between the recent United States election results and Brexit, one thing has become abundantly clear in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president: the nation that we once thought we knew has been plunged into a period of total and complete uncertainty.

Since we are now in an era where we can no longer have a reasonable expectation as to what comes next, all we can do is look at the few facts we have available. First of all, Hillary Clinton did a very poor job of holding onto the black and Hispanic vote that Barack Obama successfully mobilized during his campaign, which partially contributed to the surprising results.

To make matters worse, the betting markets who are usually accurate when it comes to predicting elections were proven to be very wrong. Political forecasters and pundits who believed that Hillary Clinton was a slam dunk to be elected as President were left scrambling in the wake of the election and even prognosticators as reliable as BBC and Fivethirtyeight led their observers astray

This election has exposed societal fault lines all across America and the results point to an ideological shift. United States presidential voters were given a poll that asked them to give their opinions on a number of subjects, so that they could decide whether certain “isms” were sources of positivity or negativity.

Feminism and social liberalism are the two topics that were discussed and as you might have imagined, Republicans and Democrats were nowhere near seeing eye to eye on them. Globalization and immigration beliefs were also polled, with Democrats having a far more positive point of view than Republicans.

While the results of this election are not quite the harbinger of doom that people on the left would have you believe, they do expose a massive chasm between those who consider themselves to have liberal values and those who consider themselves to be more conservative.

Those who voted for Trump did so out of a belief that the changing times were not to their benefit. Fair or unfair, there is a large section of American citizens who do not see social progress as a positive force. They see it as a way to infringe on their civil liberties and block their chances of progressing as planned.

This group views Donald Trump as the answer to their problems, but whether he is or not remains to be seen. As of the moment, the only thing that we know for certain is that many people have used their votes as a way to take a risk and push the nation forward. Only time will tell if they had the right idea.