DOVER, England — Kent is England’s first line of defense against the world that begins at the white cliffs of Dover and, getting ever more foreign after France, continues to the far end of Asia. The English Channel is little more than 20 miles wide as it hooks around the bottom right corner of England, and on a clear, late summer morning like this, you can see Calais and the dunes of the French coast. The Romans and the Normans invaded from there. Napoleon and Hitler would have done the same if they could have.

(Gareth Fuller/AP)

Dover sits below its cliffs, a tatty mix of tourist attraction and working port. Its backstreets feel faded. Like Calais across the water, Dover is economically depressed and politically radical. Unlike most of southern England, this is Brexit country. When the Victorian moralist Matthew Arnold came here on his honeymoon in 1851, he heard in the scrape of the retreating tide on its pebbled beach the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the age of faith and the end of the world. Today, the world and all its faiths and feuds are coming north and west.