Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, as economic inequality has steadily increased to historic levels and the divide between the richest and poorest Americans has become more and more apparent, class-based politics have made a not-so-surprising comeback in the United States. After decades of shifting to the right of the political spectrum, embracing neoliberal policies and shunning any politics that may be deemed “class warfare” by the other side, the Democratic party now seems to be regaining something of a spine — though whether the left can really find a home there is still something of an uncertainty.

The clearest manifestation of class politics in 2016 has obviously been the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, who has run on egalitarian ideals — railing against economic inequality and the billionaire class, while promoting bold Social democratic policies like universal healthcare and free public college tuition. But the left-wing revival goes beyond Sanders, as seen with popular movements like the Fight for 15, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Verizon strikes, as well as an intellectual resurgence, evinced by the popular Jacobin magazine and the enormous success of Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, “Capital In the Twenty-First Century.”

As the left restores class and economic inequality to the political discourse, however, it would do well to recognize how the Republican party’s own populist candidate has attracted such broad support among working-class Americans. (It can’t all be explained by bigotry, as some liberals like to imagine.) While it may sound absurd to say that a billionaire plutocrat like Donald Trump has succeeded in large part because of class politics, it’s not that far from the truth.

Of course, Trump hasn’t run as an economic populist denouncing his own oligarchic class, but as a common man denouncing America’s social elite (i.e. snobby liberals). In Trump’s variety of class politics, economic divisions are mostly ignored. (How else could a billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth became a man of the disillusioned people?) Trump has made a campaign out of trashing liberal elites, especially the so-called biased media and their obsession with “political correctness.” He has run as an authentic and unsophisticated populist, denouncing the Washington establishment that is so disconnected from “real Americans,” as Sarah Palin likes to call those who vote for Tea Party candidates.

In one of the most acclaimed books about the modern populist right, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” Thomas Frank investigates the cultural “class politics” that Trump has run on in 2016, and it is worth quoting at length:

“Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity… What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush. The nation’s producers don’t care about unemployment or a dead-end life or a boss who makes five hundred times as much as they do. No. In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they need in books…We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore “class warfare” — meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism — and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the “media elite” or the haughty, Volvo-driving “eastern establishment.”

(Frank’s book was published in 2004, but is even more relevant today in a post-Tea Party America.)

While Trump has frequently assailed free trade deals like NAFTA, his campaign has mainly been focused on non-economic issues, and the few economic policies that he has provided — such as his tax plan, which slashes top rates for the wealthy — align him perfectly with the ultra-conservative economics that has destroyed states like Kansas. (Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist endorsed his plan, which tells you all you need to know.) Trump has directed most of his wrath at liberals who are destroying America (is it any wonder Ann Coulter loves him?), and has managed to blame almost everything on the societal scourge that is political correctness.

Now, none of this means that plain-old racism, sexism and xenophobia haven’t been central to Trump’s success — after all, political correctness has been used by Trump to excuse many of his more inflammatory comments. But his campaign has been just as much about targeting the social elites — including the Republican establishment, but more so the eggheaded, latte liberals who believe they’re morally superior and want to take away Joe the Plumber’s freedom to shoot his gun or drive a gas-guzzling SUV or speak his mind without being accused of sexism, racism or any other kind of –ism.