Commentary When the United Kingdom finally left the European Union following the Brexit vote in 2016, the greatest insult the EU mandarins could deploy was to call the British people “retro-nationalists.” The sentiment was intended to be shameful, as though the Brits were some uncouth failed social experiment that simply lacked the sophistication and poise to be truly enlightened. This remonstration by Jean Claude Juncker to those cheeky Brits provided a revelation into the collective mind of post-nationalism because it isolated the end game and retroactively illuminated the real ideological creep that occurred in Europe when the very good idea of “an alliance of trading nations” that was the European Economic Community (EEC) migrated to be the bad idea of a “post-national” experiment. This experiment enabled national identities to become obfuscated and prostrate to a centralized EU governance machine in Brussels. The glacial shifts onward from the 1970s moved this …