The political elite can no longer find refuge in its palacesMiguel César

It’s the early hours of the morning and I’m decaying. My eyes sting – peeled open by the radioactive glow of my laptop screen. I feel like I’ve been punched really hard in the stomach. Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States of America.

Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States of America.

Writing that sentence took a weirdly long time, and a strange amount of effort. I wrote it twice because the first time was a challenge. I had to really think hard about how to move my fingers to make the words. It felt wrong, like the alarming curiosity you feel if you think for too long about how to walk.

A man who warns against vaccinating children, calls Mexican’s ‘rapists’ and brags about sexual assault, has been voted president.

From my dark, messy room in Cambridge, I half expect that, if I heave open the curtains, the world outside will be on fire. In this insular pocket of laundry and stray paper, I can’t shut my laptop. Twice now (the first time being after Brexit), I have stared my painful naivety in the face and felt sick.

‘See, this is why democracy doesn’t work: because people are so fucking stupid’ appears on my newsfeed in various forms. A lot of people I interact with seem to be saying the same thing: I know best. If only people were as clever as me, everything would be in perfect order.

This narrative of the ‘majority’ being stupid is framed by evidence that those who oppose Trump and those who oppose Brexit have higher levels of formal education. According to YouGov, support for Remain was 40 per cent higher among those with a university education. For 36 per cent of Brexit supporters, it was reported, their highest level of qualification was at GCSE or lower.

But using level of education as an indication of intelligence is ironically stupid in its reductionism. Having a qualification might help you be informed, but it doesn’t make you inherently clever. If you took any kid from a council estate and dropped them in Eton, they’d probably be at Oxbridge, too. Most people at Cambridge are very predictable outcomes of their background: being told since prep school that all of their ideas are special and that they deserve to be listened to. So it’s no surprise that the ‘everyone-is-stupid-except-me’ narrative permeates here. The irony is grim.

A phenomenon seems to be that many self-declared ‘liberals’ lament a stupid or ‘bigoted’ working class, while failing to recognise the insidious nature of their own attitudes. Caricaturing the working class as illiterate and draped in Union Jacks – the ‘Britain Furst’ Facebook page, for example – is a self-congratulatory indulgence in your moral superiority compared to the ‘stupid commoners’.

This attitude appears as people convince themselves that, because they can afford to be a vegan and have time to read The Guardian, it’s IMPOSSIBLE for them to be part of the problem. It appears as saying: not me, the stupid people are to blame.

It is this very detachment that helps to create fertile conditions for the politics of fear. It’s not ‘a small world’ when everyone around you presents themselves as liberal: it’s a divided one. Trump and Brexit spoke directly to a pain that the elite – experiencing the concentrated benefits of economic growth – can’t feel. Perhaps that’s why Trump, throughout the electoral campaign, was portrayed as an absurd joke, or an outlier. By calling the majority stupid we’re suggesting that their response is irrational – unpredictable or nonsensical. But a link can be drawn between conditions of fear, exacerbated by insecurity and inequality, and the hatred that is symptomatic of it. Working-class people did not create the conditions for the outcome of the US election. The elite did.

Racism and xenophobia are not confined to the working class. Systems of oppression permeate society on every level and the elite are not immune to perpetuating them. But those in power hold the pens that draw the boundaries of social acceptability. Instead of vilifying increasingly powerless people, we need to address the conditions that galvanised the success of neo-fascists.

Trump and Brexit are the screams of people who have not been listened to. The erosion of social mobility and growing debts of the majority is in stark juxtaposition to the concentrated, intense financial gains experienced by those in power. People are scared and it is the elite who give them reason to be, with cuts to welfare contributing to this precariousness. Trump’s election, or a Brexit propelled by a xenophobic narrative, appeared insane to me. It seems incredulous, because I’m privileged enough not to feel the fear of insecurity with the raw immediacy that a lot of voters do.  

It is the elite that won it for Trump, catalysing the allure of his hateful language through being capitalists of fear. Perhaps we’re now experiencing the unintended electoral consequences of this short-termism.

The painful irony of blaming a ‘stupid majority’ is that it contributes to the alienating disparity that helped foster the very electoral result you loathe. It is a nasty paradox which we all helped to create.