“Class is back in politics,” declared Waleed Aly last week. “We ignore it at our peril.”

That may well be true but Malcolm Turnbull’s bizarre intervention on 7.30 reminds us that the terrain opening up since Donald Trump’s win is by no means simple. In a speech obviously shaped by the election result, the prime minister launched a very Trumplike attack on what he called the “elite media”.

“You have to break out of the bubble,” he explained. “Again, I often get – on the elite media like the ABC – I often get criticised or sent up, and I don’t object to that, by the way, for catching public transport a lot.”

What’s going on when a multimillionaire merchant banker can portray himself as a persecuted anti-elitist by virtue of occasionally catching the train?

Certainly, the US election should spur progressives to end a disastrous infatuation with what we might call a “trickle down” theory of social justice.

The super wealthy and their representatives traditionally advocate monetary policies to benefit the very rich, arguing that crumbs from their already well-stocked tables will, in due course, fall to the rest of us. Progressives rightly reject so-called “trickle down economics” as self-serving nonsense. But there’s been a much greater tolerance for a similar methodology when it comes to countering oppression.

Over the past months, many ostensible radicals talked up Clinton’s credentials. They ignored that Clinton was a quintessential corporate Democrat, a multimillionaire who took huge fees from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, and, yes, she was a unabashed foreign policy hawk, who boasted of her friendship with Henry Kissinger, who, some have suggested, should be prosecuted for war crimes. And they insisted that women everywhere would by inspired by the success of a female candidate – and, as a result, be motivated to fight sexism in their own lives.

Obviously, that’s not what happened.

Rather, exit polls suggest that a majority of white female voters – the constituency assumed to most closely identify with Clinton – opted instead for Donald Trump.

Kathleen Geir offers a convincing explanation as to why.

“If you’re a woman living paycheck to paycheck,” she writes, “and worried sick over the ever-diminishing economic prospects for you and your children, you’re unlikely to be heavily invested in whether some lady centimillionaire will shatter the ultimate glass ceiling.”

It’s an argument with profound implications for a left too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures. Today, progressives regularly devote themselves to identifying high-profile representatives of the oppressed (whether in politics and pop culture, or in sport and in arts) and championing their achievements, in the expectation that diversity will trickle down to ordinary people.

Yet clearly, white female voters didn’t think Clinton’s success in overcoming sexist obstacles to her candidature would make any difference to their own lives. Rather than identifying with her as someone facing a shared oppression, they seem to have dismissed her as a privileged beneficiary of a status quo they hated.

You can see, then, why Aly labels the poll a rejection of the politics of identity and a return to the politics of class.

But what does that actually mean?

For many pundits and politicians, discussing class entails, almost by definition, rejecting the legitimacy of struggles against racism, sexism or other forms of oppression. These, they tell us, are, at best, distractions from the economic imperatives upon which class rests and, at worst, provocations driving away honest sons of toil from progressive politics.

“Class” thus become synonymous with “middle aged white men”, a constituency allegedly suspicious of refugees, environmentalism, the arts, same-sex marriage and anything much else other economic nationalism and social conservatism.

It’s on that basis that Turnbull can see the US election as a vindication of his “jobs and growth” mantra, and a rejection of the “elite” agenda of the left.

Some progressives make the same argument.

Bill Shorten, for instance, has responded to Trump’s victory with a sharply nationalistic turn.

“It is time to build Australian first,” he says, “buy Australian first in our contracts and employ Australians first.”

Many on the left – particularly in the ALP – take the failure of identity politics as proof that, if we want to relate to class anger, we can’t call out bigotry or denounce backwardness or welcome refugees. If we do so, we’ll be alienating workers, who don’t care about anything other than checking their pay packet and occasionally glumly swilling some beer.

But that way of thinking about class isn’t an alternative to identity politics. On the contrary, it is identity politics – albeit with class posited as the master identity (in place of, say, gender or race).

Leftwingers need to proceed on a very different basis.

We need to recognise that, while class can be an identity, it isn’t reducible to one. It’s an objective category, not a subjective one, defined by your activity rather than your culture or ideas. The queer female immigrant staffing a call centre in New York belongs to the working class just as much as the beefy coal miner in a mid-western rustbelt town. The nativism voiced by some blue collar Trump supporters is not, in other words, the authentic and unchanging expression of working class experience.

On the contrary, the nature of wage labour provides a basis for the expression of a very different politics.

Most fundamentally, class isn’t an individual trait but a social relationship. To use the terms popularised by Occupy Wall Street, the “99%” necessarily entails the “1%”. You can’t have employees without employers, and vice versa.

An acknowledgment of class thus already implies a political methodology, one that proceeds from the antagonism underlying that binary. More bluntly, workers and bosses have different interests, as anyone involved in negotiating a pay rise knows.

Understood in those terms, class not only offers the left a basis on which to analyse society but also provides a strategy with which to change it. Or, to put it another way, a recognition of class shouldn’t be an alternative to combatting oppression so much as a basis on which oppression can be defeated.

That’s a lesson for Australia as much as for the US.

After all, the trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership.

Gillard’s famous misogyny speech of 9 October 2012, in which she hit back at the Trump-like bullying of Tony Abbott, was widely lauded in the media. Yet, as Anwyn Crawford notes, liberal commentators enthusing about the speech paid very little attention to Gillard’s role in passing, on the very same day, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, a bill slashing slashed payments to single parents. She quotes a woman using the pseudonym “Nicole Brooks”, who complains that journalists focused on Gillard’s speech – and largely ignored what was happening to working class parents.

“The focus was on Julia Gillard and what an amazing feminist she was,” Brooks says, “but on the same day she’s hurting the most vulnerable women. That was particularly difficult to go through.”

It’s easy for rightwing populists and their journalistic supporters to portray trickle-down campaigns for social justice as elitist and snobby and irrelevant to ordinary people. But what would be the consequences of an anti-sexist campaign that oriented to the bottom of society rather than to the top?

Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s. For the rich, of course, childcare’s a non-issue. If you’ve got the money, it’s always been available. But for working class women, decent childcare can be life changing, removing a major source of social stress and bringing to an end a common form of drudgery.

It’s not hard, then, to see the outline of a class-based campaign against sexism, one that would unite ordinary women and men for a demand that would materially change family life for the majority of society.

Nor is it hard to grasp how such a push would reshape the political landscape, as the so-called populists of the right abandoned their radical rhetoric and united with their liberal opponents to defend the status quo against ordinary people. It’s easy – or, at least, possible – for Malcolm Turnbull to denounce ABC journalists as elitists. It’s much harder for him to use the same language against people like Nicole Brooks.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, demagogues of all kinds are adopting the language of class. But it’s a vocabulary that may yet come to haunt them, for while they can talk the talk, they can’t walk the walk.

That’s why, amid the gloom, there’s an opening emerging for the left, if only we can seize it.