I can see where this is heading. Trump won the US presidency and the populist right are on the march, so the story goes, because people who champion minority rights and women have overreached themselves. “The left pushed too far,” declares one Wall Street Journal columnist. “Identity politics, censoriousness and basing policy on the need of exotic sexual minorities. Now the backlash.”

Exotic sexual minorities: presumably gay men with three heads, lesbians with llama legs and trans people who can vaporise Trump supporters with laser beams. But the message is clear. Minorities who many believe are peculiar, morally depraved, perverted and/or dangerous have agitated too loudly for their rights; women (“nasty women”, perhaps) have been too assertive. They have reaped a whirlwind, and must now accept responsibility for the consequences.

The “elite” used to denote those who, in any given society, had the wealth, power and privilege: for example, privately educated ex-City brokers and billionaire plutocrats who hang out in golden lifts. It now apparently means those who defend the rights of minorities and women. The rightwing populism of our time is comfortable talking about class, but only to define a patriotic working class against a rootless, metropolitan, self-hating bunch of middle-class do-gooders with contempt for their values and lifestyles.

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” declares Theresa May, deriding a contemptuous elite who look at the working class and “find their patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial”.

According to columnist Melanie Phillips, Brexit and Trumpism represent a “people’s counter-revolution: an attempt to move politics back to the true centre of cultural gravity”. Her thesis is that the real bigots are not the white nationalists on the brink of power in Washington, but the “anti-white racism of Black Lives Matter” and other “liberals”. Those with the audacity to oppose blacklisting Muslims from entering the United States drove the decent American people into the arms of Trump, she claims.

The real tormentors of the working class are not financial institutions that plunge their countries into economic calamity, the bosses who don’t pay their workers enough, or the tax avoiders (such as Trump). No: it is the champions of minorities and women who are supposedly on a collision course with the working class. The working class, apparently, consists only of straight white men: not women who want rights, not ethnic minorities, not migrants, not LGBT people.

The old left, dominated as it was (and still is) by straight white men, long echoed this sentiment. The class struggle comes first; after the revolution, we’ll sort out everything else. It was an approach that women and minorities rebelled against. The working class was full of diversity, they argued, and class oppression was not the only injustice that many working-class people suffered.

Oppression didn’t just come from above, but from within their own communities and workplaces. Women were exploited by their bosses, just like their male counterparts: but they were also groped by men (such as Trump), or worse; paid less; and forced to do unpaid housework and the bulk of childcare.

Black workers too had lousy terms and conditions in the workplace, but they were also treated as second-class citizens by the law; harassed by the police; subjected to racist abuse in the streets; and discriminated against in the workplace, making them more likely to be unemployed.

LGBT workers, just like their straight colleagues, could be hired and fired on a whim, but they were also exposed to bigotry their entire life; often suffered mental distress because much of society rejected and hated them; were unable to hold hands with their lovers in the streets without attracting abuse and violence; and lacked the same legal rights as other couples.

Movements emerged to rectify these injustices. Such movements, throughout history, have always been accused of being too aggressive, too angry, not conciliatory enough. “Rage does not work as political opposition,” says US commentator Kurt Eichenwald in defiance of, well, all history. “Moral high ground, peaceful engagement, asking respectful questions of opponents. These work.” If polite letter-writing campaigns and chats over coffee with policymakers achieved dramatic social change, we’d still be living as barons and serfs.

The problem is that rights for women and minorities mean others losing privileges they are desperate to retain. Movements encounter resistance. They are compelled to make a nuisance, to force people who would rather ignore them to listen. And frankly, if you’ve had your life damaged by hatred and discrimination, you may feel justifiable anger and want to express it. Most people do not protest for kicks. They are bored with their oppression. They just want it to go away so they can get on with their lives.

There are those who argue the left has abandoned class in favour of identity politics. There is certainly a type of liberal who has done this: who argues for solutions such as more women in corporate boardrooms rather than addressing systemic inequality. But socialists argue that class is absolutely central to understanding society’s ills, but cannot be understood without gender, race and sexual orientation.

The multiple grievances suffered by working-class communities in Trumpland or Brexitland are caused by the financial sector, the corporate elite, and tax dodgers – not Poles, Muslims, black people or trans rights activists.

Some self-described progressives have become accomplices to the rightwing Brexiteers and Trumpists, agreeing the left has indeed over-reached. Not only does this approach throw women and minorities under a bus, it is also a strategic mistake. The Trumpists will never be satisfied. Whatever is conceded will never be enough, and will simply embolden them.

Yes, we should debate the best strategies to achieve equal rights for all and persuade the currently unconvinced. But that does not mean backpedalling or conceding in the face of a backlash. The emancipation of the working class means the whole working class: men and women, white and black, straight and LGBT. We live in an age when many bigotries have been given official sanction. Ugly demons have been unleashed on both sides of the Atlantic. The right has already won two massive votes this year. If we surrender to their agenda, we’ll be gifting them yet more victories.