Workers of the US unite – for the ‘demagogue trickster’

This is the revenge of the deplorables, a revolt of people of all races against the sneering wet leftists of the establishment. It’s a revolt that will have huge ramifications. For a spectre is haunting the West – the spectre of a working class that is not woke ... but is certainly wide awake.

The MAGA movement is revenge, ‘a revolt of people of all races against the sneering wet leftists of the establishment’. Picture: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images/AFP

The best explanation for why the Democrats lost so badly this week came from Bernie Sanders. Yes, it fell to the independent octogenarian socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, the mitten-wearing meme hero of the online left, to explain why Donald Trump romped to victory.

“It should come as no great surprise,” he said, “that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

And they’re right. pic.twitter.com/lM2gSJmQFL

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 6, 2024

In blistering prose, crackling with fury, he wondered if the Dems’ top dogs would learn “any real lessons from this disastrous campaign”. Then his curt reply to his own inquiry: “Probably not.”

He’s right. What happened in the US this week was not rocket science. You don’t need a PhD in political studies to understand why more than 72 million people, many of them working class, took a punt on the man Kamala Harris and her media acolytes madly branded a fascist.

It’s not because they’re dumb. It’s not because they fell under the spell of Trump’s demagogic trickery. It’s not because they are “low information”, as The New Yorker magazine suggested shortly before the election. It sent one of its haughty reporters to mingle “among America’s ‘low-information’ voters”, as a colonial-era anthropologist might have studied a far-flung African tribe.

No, Trump did not steal these voters – the Democrats lost them.

The Make America Great Again movement did not hypnotise the uneducated to join its ranks. Rather, the Dems drove these people away.

It let leak its contempt for them and so, like all right-thinking people in toxic relationships, they packed their bags and left.

Trump has done something extraordinary: forged a new multiracial working-class coalition.

He won bigly – as he might say – among the white working class. Around 66 per cent of this key, angry constituency voted for him.

He improved his standing among Latinos, who heavily skew working class. He won 55 per cent of Hispanic men and 38 per cent of Hispanic women. He made some gains among African-African voters, too, especially men.

The bracing realignment in US politics is best captured in the fact that 62 per cent of Americans who never darkened the door of a college voted for Trump, while Harris swept up the votes of the hyper-educated. More than 60 per cent of those with an advanced degree voted for her.

The snobs of the mournful media, because they can’t help themselves, say this shows that educated people make better choices. In truth, it confirms the Dems are now the party of the credentialed elites while MAGA is a solidly working-class movement.

Harris sought the support of the sharp-elbowed classes while Trump connected with the horny-handed classes. It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of this shift. It’s tectonic.

If you went back 50 years and told Joe Blue Collar that one day he’d be more likely to vote for a billionaire real estate magnate with too much fake tan than for the Democratic Party, he’d have thought you mad. Yet here we are.

The divorce of the Democrats and the working class has been brewing for decades. Author Ruy Teixeira calls it “the Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class”.

And now Trump is saying hello to them. He’s saying: “I will listen to you.” And they’re taking a chance on him. Why not? The weirdest thing about the left’s frothing rage over Trump, their branding of him as a lunatic outlier, is that he’s offering working-class voters the kind of thing the left once offered them.

He’s promising to tackle inflation. And polls consistently showed that working people’s top priority in this election was the scourge of soaring prices.

He says he will fix the border and the depressive impact the arrival of these millions of undocumented migrants is having on the wages of working Americans.

He says he will halt wasteful wars. He has staked virtually his entire reputation on ending the war in Ukraine. This pledge is remarkably popular. So many Trump voters I met in the US this week praised The Donald’s peacenik tendencies. Fascists? They sounded more like hippies.

Making the economy work for working people, controlling the flow of cheap labour, ending war – didn’t the left, long ago, agitate for things like this? Now they call it Nazism.

All that working-class voters have got from the credentialed classes that now dominate the institutions of the left is scolding and sermons. They’re called racist for wanting to fix the porous border. They’re called transphobic if they don’t want a 15-year-old boy on their daughter’s sports team. They’re called “low information” if they question the edicts of the mainstream media.

On and on it goes – a sniffy lecturing of the little people dressed up as activism.

People are sick of it. They’re sick of being told to “take the knee” to the eccentric ideologies of the rich new left.

They’re tired of being called bigots because they are not au fait with the latest woke lingo and don’t wear pronoun badges.

They’ve had enough of politics being dominated by the neuroses of the upper classes rather than by the needs and interests of the working classes.

So they’ve risen up. Their vote for Trump is the biggest “F you” of modern times. It’s the revenge of the deplorables, a revolt of people of all races against the sneering wet leftists of the establishment.

It’s a revolt that will have huge ramifications. Leftists everywhere should quake. For a spectre is haunting the West – the spectre of a working class that is not woke but is certainly wide awake.