US election: Trump victory marks revolt against Establishment

US president-elect Donald Trump delivers his victory speech in New York yesterday.

It is the great American political shock of the past century. This has been a revolt against the US establishment, against conventional politics, against the global status quo. It is a cry from the disaffected white working-class heart of traditional America.

A Trump victory shatters the existing order in the US and around the world. It is the ultimate triumph of the outsider. It will frighten markets and prejudice world economic confidence. It will create huge global uncertainty, demand a “processing of disbelief”, raise immense challenges for Australia, among other nations, and open the door to an unpredictable era of dangerous US division.

The scale of Trump’s achievement is staggering. He won in the teeth of formal resistance from his own party. America faces the prospect of a Trump presidency with the Republicans in the ascendancy in the Senate and House.

Trump, never having held public office, is a political novice who broke every rule in the book and defied the polls. The immediate issue is his ability to calm global nerves, contain his narcissism and project an unrevealed sense of judgment and pragmatism.

This is a smashing victory for economic populism and trade ­protectionism.

It has the potential to change the world. It will cripple global climate change action, ­inject fear into US allies and risk a trade battle with China.

White Americans marched out to reclaim their country, save their traditional values, halt the structural changes destroying their jobs and demand their economic interests be addressed.

This is a vote against globalisation, its inequities and the progressive cultural norms starting to transform America.

It is inspired by pessimism, not optimism. It reflects a country that distrusts its political system and its elites, in Washington, the media and the cultural heights of New York and California. It is the ultimate triumph of “outsiders” against “insiders”. It will demand a reassessment about the nature of America, its values and its current psychology.

Exit-poll analysis from the BBC suggested that Trump won on the white vote, winning this demographic 58-37 per cent, while Hillary Clinton won the black vote 88-8 per cent and the Hispanics 65-29 per cent. This is a nation divided against itself.

It suggests the Clintons misjudged and overreached. The America they represent has been rebuffed in the mid-west, in struggling industrial states and by an angry white and lower-middle class that felt they had been left voiceless for too long.

The great danger for America is that Trump, an architect of bitter division in the campaign, will remain an agent of division in the White House. If Clinton wins the popular vote but loses in the electoral college such tensions will only grow.

Trump has won a moral victory having waged an immoral campaign. The issue is whether the Democrats challenge a tight result. The fear now is this result will only intensify the racial, cultural and power conflicts in America. What will Trump say? Will he seek to calm the “lock her up” chants?

The ironies are immense. The campaign saw the Republican Party in crisis. Yet a Trump victory is guaranteed to throw the Democrats into an unexpected crisis. Barack Obama will leave office; the Clintons will be finished; the Democrats, consumed with grief and resentment, are likely to lurch to the Left, intensifying the polarisation of US politics and society.

The American people, having voted for Obama on two occasions, have declined to vote Clinton as the Obama successor. This is a turning point. Yet grasping its full import will take weeks and years.