In other words, Emmanuel Macron is the Donald Trump of the elite class. He’s not just their representative—he’s their avatar. Trump’s die-hard followers love him with such devotion not just because they like what he says, but because his image is that of the guy they wish they were or could be. It’s the same thing with Macron and his own elite base. And this is the stuff out of which Messianic movements are made.

The comparison is not perfect—for one thing, I have no problem with the idea of Macron having his finger over my country’s nuke button, while the idea of Trump with his finger over the American nuke button gives me cold sweats. But it gets at what I wish every American understood about Macron: His brand of pragmatic centrist politics is really just class-interest-based politics.

As Christophe Guilluy, a sociologist and leading analyst of contemporary society, pointed out, Macron’s supporters can be boiled down to one word: They are the “haves.” They are the people who rode the waves of change that have inundated the West over the past few decades—globalization, technological transformation—to great success. Education is the best predictor of voting for Macron, which makes sense, since it correlates not just with financial capital but also with cultural capital. Another predictor is age, although in a perhaps-unexpected way: Macron is highly popular with the elderly, whose pensions protect them from the liberalizing reforms Macron campaigned on, and very unpopular with the young, who disproportionately come out the losers in France’s contemporary economy.

This explains why, after having used the oddities of the French electoral system to get elected as an alternative to worse candidates, Macron is extremely unpopular. Non-elite French people smell exactly what the elites smell, and their reaction is equally predictable. Now, Macron supporters don’t believe that they support him for the crass reason that he will benefit their class at the expense of the rest of the country; instead, they just believe that what’s good for them is good for the country. Call it “trickle-down economics.” But, of course, nobody believes they support a certain policy simply because it’s good for them. Building the U.S.-Mexico border wall is cast as being about American identity, something all Americans can identify with, not about a protectionist barrier for the wages of Trump supporters at the expense of the well-heeled beneficiaries of low-wage immigration.

There’s nothing uniquely bad about this: Groups defending their interests just is what politics is. Democratic politics endures because it’s the least-bad mechanism we’ve come up with for handling precisely that.

But there’s a flip-side to Macron’s class-based politics: If you decide to replace the old left-right divide with the divide between the haves and the have-nots, haven’t you created a monster of a different sort?