And so the United States has embraced the demagogue, a man who ran for the presidency as a kind of lone entrepreneur, without benefit of funding or even a political party, really. Every poll had him losing, some of them had him losing massively. And he won, thanks to the votes of millions of working-class whites which he did not really have any business winning.
How did it happen? Well, consider the traditional party of the American working class. For years the Democrats have been beguiled by the idea that all political victories lay in a kind of squishy centrism that involved making compromises with the Republicans. Working-class people, they assumed, had “nowhere else to go” as the party’s leaders triangulated to the centre. And so, led by Hillary Clinton’s husband, they got the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed and the banks deregulated— measures that were like poison to working class people and their organisations.