So America’s ruling classes have lost to a billionaire who plays at being a man of the people. Donald Trump ran against the hierarchy of his own party, without the blessing of commentators or the big CEOs, without the speeches to Wall Street or the funding from Silicon Valley. Amid all the justifiable dismay expressed today, don’t forget one thing: Hillary Clinton was the establishment candidate; it was Trump who ran as the perennially unfancied outsider.

He remains an almost illicit politician, a preference you express in hushed tones. Look at the placards brandished last night by self-declared members of the “silent majority”. Just over a month ago, I rang round Trump voters in West Virginia and Pennsylvania – two of the states that went red last night. Among the things that struck me most forcibly was how sheepish they were about admitting publicly they were going to vote for the man. “He’s a jackass, but … ” one began. Another: “I think he’s a total idiot, but … ”

But I’ll back him. But who else is there? But I’ve had enough. That was the tenor of nearly all the conversations – with a few citizens of one of the noisiest democracies on Earth then asking if I could keep their identities secret.

Well, let me add another but. Trump is an outsider politician leading an insurgency of self-declared outsider Americans: the white men who feel homeless in their own country and the coal-mining and rustbelt states that got written off by both parties – but that won’t produce outsider policies. A good chunk of the Trump base consists of people who consider themselves to be losers from four decades of political and economic orthodoxy. But Donald J Trump won’t be the president who reads the last rites for neoliberalism – for the simple reason that the empty-headed narcissist has no idea what to replace it with.

A revolt isn’t a revolution. The head prefects in our politics and media see disorder and immediately cry insurrection

This isn’t the mainstream view. Among the prefects of political and economic commentary, the standard thing to do this morning is to rehearse Trump’s fury at free trade, to look at the voters that most of them have never bothered talking to – and to squawk that America has struck out in a new and radically different direction. It’s a revolution! The pitchforks finally have their leader!

As Trump edged towards the 270-mark, one of the first emails I got was from a senior fund manager at the giant Fidelity group, declaring: “We are heading into a world of unprecedented political risk which calls into question the pillars of the post-WWII settlement.” At least as far as the economics go, that is just overheated nonsense.

First, it ignores just how protean Trump’s politics are. This is the man who just a few months ago in an off-the-record meeting at the New York Times told senior journalists that “everything is negotiable”. This is the Republican warrior whose most memorable photo is of him and his new wife laughing along with his VIP guests Bill and Hillary Clinton. This is the blowhard who can’t help contradicting himself. Take out the contortions, exaggerations and outright lies from the standard Trump riff – and you have next to nothing. All this makes him easily containable for the Republicans in the Senate and the House that he’ll need to work with .

What the head boys and head girls also miss is just how old-fashioned Trumponomics is. Look at the people around him. Among his top economic advisers is Stephen Moore from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank last seen laying down many of the policy planks for Ronald Reagan. Sure enough, the policies are pure Reagan: slashing red tape and business taxes, “a major tax cut” on income, a repeal of estate taxes and a hankering for high interest rates and sound money.

This sort of tax-cutting will cost trillions – up to $9tn over the next decade, according to some modelling. They will rip a hole through US public finances – especially if Trump brings them in alongside his spending spree on infrastructure. But his promise now is the promise that was made by Reagan, his adviser Arthur Laffer and the rest of the snake-oil salesmen: it will bring in more tax revenue over the long run.

None of this will be much help for his blue-collar voters. But then the property billionaire isn’t into sharing out the wealth, encouraging trade unions or paying workers more. It wasn’t so long ago that he claimed wages were “too high” – before flip-flopping and tweeting that America’s middle classes have had “no effective raise in years. BAD.” His latest position is that “I would like to see an increase [in the minimum wage] of some magnitude. But I’d rather leave it to the states.” Gee thanks, Donald!

You can see the paradox. Much of Trump’s base was voting against the great unravelling of America’s social contract. They were rebelling against Reaganism and its love for Wall Street over Main Street, its property boom and industrial bust. Yet what they’re about to get is more Reaganism, from a man whose glory years were the Reagan years. When that doesn’t work out, the new president will retreat further into his anti-immigrant, “decent people” rhetoric. If he need script lines, he can borrow some from the new British government.

A revolt isn’t a revolution. The head prefects in our politics and media see disorder and immediately cry insurrection. That’s what they did in Britain after the Brexit vote and it’s how they’ll mark 20 January, 2017, the date of President Trump’s inauguration. Just as they called those events wrong, so they’ll call the aftermath wrong.

You can overdo the comparisons, but let’s at least agree that Trump’s America and Brexit Britain share the same common tragedy: a large chunk of the public that’s had enough of the same-old failed orthodoxy, a technocratic elite that also knows it’s no longer working – and a political class unable to grasp any real alternatives.