If Brexit was the foreshock, this is the earthquake – a political upset of a different magnitude, with the capacity to reshape the entire global order. Before Donald Trump’s election, Brexit was the high water mark of a populist revolt which has been gathering pace across the western world and beyond.
Just as Brexit offered hope to Trump, his victory will encourage Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Trump's triumph will bolster Hungary's Viktor Orban and Poland's Law and Justice Party and will delight Russia's Vladimir Putin, whose intelligence agencies may have worked to promote it.
Election night in the US was an uncanny echo of Britain's referendum count in June, with Hillary Clinton, like the Remain camp, starting the evening as the firm favourite to win. Clinton's numbers shook at the start, then crumbled and finally collapsed in an avalanche, just like that of the Remainers.
There were echoes of Brexit too in the concentration of Trump’s support outside the big cities and his success in parts of the post-industrial rust belt that had long been Democratic strongholds. Like those who backed Brexit, Trump’s supporters were overwhelmingly white, older and mostly male. As in the referendum, education was the strongest indicator of voter choice in the US election, with whites who did not go to college backing Trump by a margin of two to one.
Polling by Lord Ashcroft after the referendum found that a vote for Brexit was closely associated with a dislike of multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmentalism, globalisation and immigration. Trump represented a rejection of all of these innovations, and his personal displays of racism and misogyny seemed to some of his supporters as audacious acts of resistance against what he called "political correctness".
Income as guide
Income was a less reliable guide to voting intention in both the referendum and the US election than age, race, gender and education. But both Trump and Brexit appealed to the remnant of the traditional, industrial, white working class, the so-called “left-behind” who have been most dramatically affected by globalisation and social changes.
This group also forms an important part of the support base for Le Pen's Front National in France and for Wilders's Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands. Germany's Alternative für Deutschland, Austria's Freiheitlichen and Sweden's Sverigedemokraterna, also draw much of their support from the white working class.
The consensus forged by parties of the centre-right and the centre-left around liberal economic and social policies has helped to drive such voters into the arms of the populist right. And the economic crash of 2008 brought home to more people than ever that the current economic bargain works for too few of them.
What all of these parties have in common with Trump is a concept of “the people” which excludes certain minorities as well as the elites who have dominated mainstream politics and the media. When Trump’s supporters speak of “taking their country back”, they don’t always specify from whom.
In the same way, when Nigel Farage described Brexit as a victory for "real people", he didn't define exactly who they were. In continental Europe, the lines are more clearly drawn, with ethnic and religious minorities, the very poor and the non-productive, liberal technocrats of the elite all excluded from the category of "real people".
Circle of authenticity
In Britain last week, it emerged that for Brexit’s most strident backers in the press, high court judges are outside the circle of authentiticity. After three judges ruled that MPs should be allowed to vote on whether
Theresa May
should start formal Brexit talks with the EU, the
Daily Mail
described them as “enemies of the people”.
Like the Mail, the Daily Telegraph pictured the three judges on its front page, under the headline "The judges versus the people".
The fact that neither May nor her lord chancellor Liz Truss condemned the attack on the judges reinforced a sense that public discourse in Britain has coarsened since Brexit and that the norms that govern it are vulnerable. Right-wing populists throughout the world play fast and loose with democratic institutions and Trump's rhetoric during the campaign suggests that he will be no different.
Brexit and Trump's victory both represent in part a rejection of the economic othodoxy which has prevailed since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Both have left the establishment in the main parties – the congressional Republican and Democratic leadership in the US, and Labour MPs and free market Conservatives in Britain – stranded down the blind alley of their faith in the market.
Social Democrats across Europe face similar isolation unless they rediscover their confidence in the power of the state to shape the economy in the public interest. And they should seek common cause with those parties further to the left whose answer to the anguished voters who propelled Trump to power is radical and ambitious but also pluralist and inclusive.