Right-wing populism thrives because the world of the working classes has been destroyed by corporate capitalism and has become devalued by cultural progressive elites who, from the 1980s onwards, focused their intellectual and political energy on sexual and cultural minorities, thus generating fierce culture wars. Once the world of the working class was destroyed and spurned, it could be restored through promises of lost racial, religious and ethnic privileges.

Trumps election is a wake-up call for the left throughout the world. However polarized the worlds of the cultural elites and the conservative working-class may have become, the left has no choice but to re-engage with the moral world of lives that have been torn asunder by the rippling effects of colonialism and capitalism. Short of that, in the long run, liberalism may be doomed to extinction.