Donald Trump found himself at the crux of fault lines in American society. There are similar fractures running through most first world countries. Credit:James D. Morgan The intersections where they meet are places where rational understanding sometimes fails us, especially if we cannot put aside our own inherent biases. But it's important we do because the same forces exist to differing extents and in altered states here. Political actors will try to exploit them in same way that Trump intuited, bumbled and barnstormed his way to supreme power. I listened to a deeply personal, uncomfortable response to Trump's victory on a New York Times podcast, Still Processing. The hosts, two people of colour, were in shock and tears. Days later. For them, understandably, it felt like losing the first battle in a race war.

And yet many Latino and black voters cast their lot in with Trump and, by extension, the alt-right white supremacist movements supporting him from the fringe. Among the vast river of podcasts, hot takes and think pieces I've been mainlining since last week, are contributions from unknowable numbers of women, horrified and shaken to their core that a man who did not simply admit to repeated sexual assaults but privately revelled in his power and freedom to do so, is now the most powerful man in the world. And yet tens of millions of women voted for him. White working-class women voted for him overwhelmingly. The Harvard Business Review poring over the latest poll results found that "WWC women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62 per cent to 34 per cent. If they'd split 50-50, she would have won." Which brings us to class. To economics.

Acknowledging the reality that in America's non-compulsory voting system, any president is unlikely to attract the mandate of more than a quarter of the entire eligible voting population, Donald Trump won because he spoke directly to the working class, which is still about three-quarters white, in a language they understood because they speak it themselves. To sensitive ears it sounds harsh, boorish, ignorant, even bigoted. And at times it is all those things. But it is the kind of harsh talk you can expect to hear from a class of people, and I mean an economic class, when they feel the system has been stacked against them. It speaks to the animus which delivered the Brexit vote and it can very much sound like hate speech because hatred, not just of the Other, but of one's own wretched and diminishing circumstances, drives it. Open markets have generated staggering, almost unimaginable wealth, but not for everyone. As the old working class has been fed into the shredders of neoliberal economics, millions, tens of millions and maybe hundreds of millions of men and women around the world, have come to correctly perceive of themselves as losers. How does this economic dislocation manifest as racial or cultural conflict? Because as our economy has changed, so has the society which it is supposed to support. It shouldn't be the other way around, a society should not exist to serve an economy, but one of the triumphs of neoliberalism has been to elevate the economic above the social. This plays out in a political conflict like Brexit as a contest over controlling migration.

Economic growth demands the free movement of capital, including human capital. The losers from this restructuring see not only their own livelihoods destroyed by the offshoring of production to cheaper unregulated developing economies, but they experience the existential threat of those "lesser" and "primitive" economies sending back not just finished goods, but the people who produced them. They arrive as migrants, and bring with them a host of alien cultures to further erode the previously accepted social contract. The interests of the one per cent, of capital, of whatever you want to call the super rich, who are admittedly not themselves a monolithic structure, can generally be said to lean towards ensuring that the fear and loathing felt by so many attaches itself to cultural changes, not economic ones. Hence the hysterical coverage of race, religious and cultural disruption in the media of the corporate right. Loading

Add to this the perceived threats from "enemies within", the blast wave of social change from an atomising society – and you can begin to understand why so many tens of millions of people might feel that they have nothing to lose. From a Brexit. From a Trump presidency. From whatever reactionary force presents itself to the Australian electorate in the next few years.