“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump said last February, during a speech in Las Vegas. The phrase was the opening sentence of a piece on the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that I wrote for The New Yorker in August. Now we know that the poorly educated—or, at least, many white men without college degrees—love Trump back, almost unanimously. The stunning political revolution in the United States has exposed a stark educational and rural-urban divide; Rousseau might help us solve at least one part of the intellectual puzzle that Trump’s rise to power has posed.

Beginning with his first major publication, in 1751, Rousseau, too, defended unlettered folk and their simple ways. Significantly, he did so just as the world’s first well-educated, networked élite—the Enlightenment philosophers—came into being, advocating a far-reaching program of progress through the use of science, reason, and international commerce. Rousseau’s more radical move was to position himself against the project that we now call modernity; he practically invented the category of “the people,” whom he identified as victims of top-down decisions and value systems.

But before we berate ourselves for being out of touch with those who have been left behind, we should remember that many well-educated white men and women also voted for Trump (who happens to be the owner of a private jet and a three-story penthouse in Manhattan). Rousseau, who was born poor but died relatively rich, clarified through his own life and career that ressentiment can erupt within any income group; it does not breed in material inequalities or class divisions alone. The fear of losing status and identity motivates many people, often into acting against their self-interest.

Rousseau’s own self-defined struggle, as an outsider in Paris, was against a metropolitan élite. His most bitter adversary was Voltaire, the son of a lawyer, who scoffed at religion, upheld the stock exchange as the embodiment of secular rationalism, and, having lucratively participated in international trade, died one of the richest commoners in Europe. Rousseau accused Voltaire, along with his posh peers, of claiming undue moral superiority; in opposition to their ideals, he posited the general will—volonté générale—in which alienated individuals reconstitute themselves as a sovereign, firmly rooted, and fiercely patriotic people. While the Enlightenment philosophers supported their patron, Empress Catherine of Russia, in her military crusades to bring modernity to Poland and Turkey, Rousseau sketched a blueprint for a defensive civic nationalism that pointedly excluded cosmopolitans and foreigners. Trump, in denouncing free trade, stigmatizing Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and offering a new social contract to an America First white population, might have borrowed directly from Rousseau’s novel “Émile; or, On Education,” in which he wrote, “Every patriot is severe with strangers. They are nothing in his eyes.”

The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that competition between a hyper-rationalist, sophisticated élite and a revolutionary, often anarchic and violent voluntarism defines all of modern French history. In many ways, our present, nearly universal crisis is also marked by these two rival pathologies. Among Trump’s many demagogic peers, Narendra Modi, of India, also rose to power by venting a bitter animus on Twitter against his country’s postcolonial Anglophone class—what is known as the Lutyens élite, after the architect Edwin Lutyens, who designed many buildings in New Delhi during British rule. One of the targets of Modi’s trash talk was the Oxford-educated novelist and former U.N. official Shashi Tharoor. “What a girlfriend!” he said about Tharoor’s wife at the time. “Have you ever seen a fifty-crore”—four-million-dollar—“girlfriend?” Modi, India’s most powerful Prime Minister in seven decades, is now supervising a nationwide purge of rootless liberals and left-wingers, but in a television interview, a few weeks ago, he still seemed to be obsessing about a Lutyens cabal. “These ‘custodians’ who are dedicated to a select few will never accept anyone who is linked to the roots of this country,” Modi said.

Trump himself is a raging embodiment of what Rousseau called “amour propre”: the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as by oneself. Such vanity is a particularly heavy burden for a flashy plutocrat to carry in monochromatically liberal Manhattan. The headline of a Times article about a 2014 interview is telling: “What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show: Lust for Fighting, Obsession with Media, Fear of Being Forgotten.” An analysis by Politico of Trump’s tweets since 2009 reveal an abnormally frequent recourse to the words “winner” and “loser,” not to mention “I” and “great.” For many years now, a seemingly unappeasable amour propre has fuelled Trump’s takedowns of liberal élites, a group evidently made more intolerable by the suspiciously alien black resident of the White House.

But what rescued Trump from a late career of desperate self-promotion on Twitter was a larger backlash against the technocracy, one that went little noticed in the West until Britain’s populace voted to withdraw from the European Union, in June. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” Michael Gove, a leading Tory Brexiteer, declared in the run-up to the referendum. Gove and his colleagues went on to unleash a blizzard of patently mendacious claims, contributing, along with Trump, to the murky realm of “post-truth politics.” As Sebastian Mallaby, the recent biographer of the American economist Alan Greenspan, points out, “Both Gove and Trump sensed, correctly, that experts were primed for a fall.”

For Rousseau, the “imperious dogmatists” prescribing rationalism to all of humanity were self-interested and undemocratic. Even today, “people with projects,” as the legal scholar David Kennedy calls the experts of our own age in his groundbreaking new book, “A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy,” are far from neutral arbiters and dispensers of knowledge. Rather, they are seekers of “wealth, status, and opportunity.” Kennedy’s book examines the methods and assumptions of political decision-makers, policy professionals, economic-development specialists, humanitarian interventionists, and international lawyers. He argues that our interconnected world—“terribly unjust, subject to crisis, environmentally unwise, everywhere politically and economically captured by the few”—has become “impossible for anyone to alter or escape” because of “the relative invisibility and imperviousness of the world of technical management to contestation.”

Modi and Trump have zealously capitalized on a profound hatred of this seemingly indestructible iron cage of modernity, turning free traders, liberal internationalists, and technocrats into objects of mass fear and loathing. It is also true that the latter’s rosy predictions—that post-communist Russia will embrace liberal capitalism; that regime change will usher democracy into Iraq; that India is Rising; that Africa is Rising; or, more generally, that the rising tide of globalization is lifting all boats—set the stage for “post-truth politics” universally. Such extravagant, if not false, claims certainly contributed to the hostility that many among the poorly educated feel toward the well-educated.

The fiascos of hyper-rationalist expertise have again spawned an irrational fantasy of voluntarism, of the sovereign people taking back control. What is new—and truly world-historical—is that this has happened within the modern West; we have so far identified rebellions against top-down socioeconomic engineering only in non-Western and underdeveloped countries. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 against the Shah of Iran’s expert-driven and radically disruptive modernization was one such ferocious upsurge—the first “great insurrection against global systems,” as Michel Foucault rightly called it. Originally led by left-leaning Iranians, the popular revolution was hijacked by a know-nothing cleric. Trump is a similar opportunist: cometh the hour, cometh the man. Certainly, Rousseau would not have been surprised to see that today’s revolt against the élites has empowered a Twitter troll in the very heartland of modernity.