The result and aftermath of the US election has in many quarters been compared to that of the Brexit vote. In each scenario, so the narrative goes, we had an enlightened, metropolitan liberal-left directing its scorn towards an ill-educated, right-wing multitude – the ‘left behind’ who surprisingly triumphed. It’s a nice, pat observation. But unfortunately, it’s also not true.

The striking thing about the derided, out-of-touch liberal metropolitan elite in both countries is actually how un-lefty its members seem to be. Ever since Brexit, we’ve had voices on the left fretting that bankers and high finance might leave the City of London – the same bankers we were previously called upon to despise. There’s been an associated concern about the economic effects of a clampdown on immigration. Add to this worries about inflation and our trading relationship with the rest of the European Union. The principal case for remaining in the EU has been and still is economic. Why should this be? It’s because the Remain case was based on vested material interests, not the principle of democracy or the social wellbeing of the country. It’s all about sainted GDP figures. Immigrants aren’t spoken of as human beings, but as being ‘good for the economy’ (ie, cheap labour and domestic service). How strange that all the well-to-do left should care about is money these days – or maybe not, if one recalls that iconic image of Bob Geldof and chums swilling champagne and abusing fishermen on the Thames.

The old left has been collapsing in the West for some time. Being of the left today is a consumerist lifestyle choice, a means of adopting a caring pose in order to mask or atone for one’s egocentric behaviour. The ‘metropolitan elite’ may better be described as ‘the capitalist left’. Champagne socialism was once considered an amusing aberration in Britain, but it is now the norm in a country in which to be of the left is a means of projecting one’s public good standing. Virtue signalling and protesting is a substitute for social action, not an expression of it. One puts up a ‘Vote Labour’ placard once every five years to atone for the fact that you aren’t remotely a socialist. No wonder the left is so enraptured by identity politics, the ultimate form of ‘choice’ and means of self-branding. There are more than 50 varieties of gender identity you can buy into today. No wonder the liberal left has taken to the streets after Trump’s victory, behaving like disgruntled consumers who didn’t get what they’d chosen at a department store.

This is why they get so cross at the ‘deplorables’ and the Brexiteers, those who don’t see politics as either economic self-interest or conspicuous compassion, but – in various strands – speak of such antiquated concepts as democracy, the people, community, social cohesion. The people of the Rust Belt in America and of the deprived northern towns in England who voted Brexit may be old-fashioned in their patriotism, but they are also old-fashioned in their economic outlook: to them, not everything is about GDP figures, but how the economy actually serves human beings. Their revolt is one against a vacuous class that has become disproportionately obsessed with the rights of minorities or infatuated by middle-class trivialities such as transgender politics. Thirty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about the plight of the blue-collar worker; today he campaigns for the right of transgender men to go into women’s lavatories. This is why the revolt against the ruling classes in Spain and Greece has simultaneously taken on a far-left guise: Podemos and Syriza also recognise how the ruling classes have become effete and decadent. What’s happening across the Western world now is no longer a left-vs-right matter, it’s a more simple, brutal case of the deplorables versus the deplored.