Illustration: Andrew Dyson In the end Trumpism cannot be reduced to simple, crude identity politics. There's no doubt it's there, just ask all the white supremacists who championed him. And it will almost certainly inspire a truly awful wave of ugliness against women and minorities around the world. But the truth is that crude prejudice is not nearly enough to win an election. Not this one, anyway. And most importantly, that's not how many of Trump's voters see him. Exit polls during the election (for what they're worth) show 70 per cent of voters were bothered by Trump's alleged treatment of women. The same amount wanted to see illegal immigrants given a path to legal status. Only a quarter wanted to see them deported. Most of them (80 per cent) voted for Trump, but that makes up less than half his vote. It's not how Trump won. It turns out Trump's vulgarity, his barely unvarnished racism and sexism was, if not a distraction, then highly distracting. Strip them away – possibly with an industrial strength solvent – and you're left with a campaign that would be more at home in the Democrats.

Illustration: Simon Letch Suspicious of free trade, disparaging of corporate behemoths, preaching that big money is screwing the little guy, thoroughly anti-globalisation. And it's this message – this deeply radical message that has nothing to do with what America has been since at least Ronald Reagan – that has made a Trump administration possible. Racism might have helped to give Trump the southern states Republicans usually win anyway. But Trump won this in the white working class states Democrats usually take for granted, some of which they haven't lost for years. "We now have to hope that president Trump turns out to be a different man to candidate Trump," Davidson said after Trump's election. Credit:AP Clinton didn't even visit Wisconsin after she won the nomination. She wouldn't even have considered she could lose Michigan until the past fortnight. Pennsylvania? That, too, was part of Clinton's "blue wall" that was meant to give Trump nowhere to go. Trump smashed through it. And he did it with a politics of class.

For some 30 years, that's been heresy. Especially since the end of the Cold War, ours has been a politics of identity, of liberation. That is, it's been a thoroughly liberal politics: free, open, unbounded lives in a free, open, unbounded economy. That's especially visible to us in Australia where the old politics of class solidarity gave way to a new politics of non-discrimination, human rights and symbolic (but definitely not economic) equality. Hillary Clinton speaks to supporters after Donald Trump was elected president. Credit:Bloomberg But even in America, consider the milestones of social progress in the past 50 years: the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, feminism, the digital revolution. All these changes have been momentous. Several of them inspiring and utterly necessary. But none of them has benefited working class whites who have seen no expansion of their rights and no appreciable economic payoff, either. What they've seen is the empowerment of everyone else, including other white people. But they've had no story to tell of their own because contemporary politics gives them no way of telling it. Class went out with Marxism, so if you didn't have a big tech idea to sell or an identity politics to assert, you had nothing to say. You know all those Silicon Valley geniuses working on driverless vehicles and extraordinary robotics that will be able to run entire factories? They're voting Democrat. And they're doing it with plenty of thought for the employers who will add billions in saved labour costs to their profits, and barely any thought at all for the working classes they'll sweep aside.

Something's wrong when a Manhattan billionaire with a record of using illegal immigrant labour and a procession of legal complaints against him for failing to pay his workers becomes the voice of working class America. Yes, I get that his voters see Trump as a defector: the guy who played the system that's screwing them and who has now pledged to lead their revolutionary army. But it's surely a sign of just how class-blind politics has become, and just how thoroughly progressive politics has abandoned its working class concerns, that Trump leads this vanguard. He can do this because progressives have treated the working class largely as a source of xenophobia, which they are pledged to fight. For years now, classism has been among the last permissible prejudice, which Australians express by routinely lampooning bogans. And it is surely a sign of how completely the political right has fallen apart that its world leader is spouting rudimentary left-wing economic pamphlets. We're watching an epic realignment here. Class is back in politics. We ignore it at our peril. And our almost determined blindness to it is exactly why we're standing here in disbelief now. Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a host on The Project.