When I got home last night from an election celebration held by friends, and former political colleagues, in which I had to submit to being metaphorically cast into the fiery abyss for my bigly Trump Neverism, I put on Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and began reading some of the early reaction to the 9.5 Richter-scale quake still shaking the post-modern political and media establishment to its foundations.

The New Yorker editor David Remnick, whom I had the pleasure of getting to know years ago and respect very much, kicked off the official period of ululating from the left (there’ll be plenty of teeth gnashing from Conservatives, too, in what will likely merge into a general yuge conflagration of elite political vanities). I won’t quibble with his character assessment of President-elect Donald Trump nor his questioning of Trump’s political convictions—they are too small to see with the naked eye. But there’s not a skerrick of solemn reflection in David’s undoubtedly cathartic though blinkered and angry rant about the weakness of Trump’s opponent, whom, when challenged by another not-so-different demagogic outsider, had to be trebucheted onto the primary podium by the Democratic machine.

And like so much of the left, David seems also to be unable to see the significance of the grievances that may explain Trump’s shock victory, however misguided some of his policies may be, and instead focuses on racism, xenophobia, misogyny and ignorance—of more than 58 million of his countryman who voted for Trump, many of whom also voted for Barack Obama. I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of political rhabdomancer or futurist. Maybe dumb luck explains why I forecast both the UK Tory majority and then the Brexit vote, and I didn’t predict Trump’s triumph. ‘It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future,’ as Yogi Berra said (or would have said if he’d thought of it). But I understood enough about some of the legitimate concerns animating Trump supporters to imagine that he could prevail, whether or not I thought he should or would.

Some years ago, when he was an Edward R Morrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (which is itself a conclave of elite wisdom on America’s role in the world), David wandered into my office and asked to borrow my copy of “Homage to Catalonia” as a reference for what was to become his Pulitzer-winning “Lenin’s Tomb,” which chronicled the last days of the Soviet Empire, from the perspective of babushkas to Zil-driven Nomenclatura. I didn’t get my book back until the manuscript was complete (and cherish my “contribution” to literary greatness). Orwell’s so-called ‘New Journalism’ style inspiration was clear. What I find ironic, in retrospect, is that such a good observer and brilliant writer as David, who cut his teeth at The Washington Post writing about sports (another feather in his cap), is that his New Journalism skills, that opened vistas in his reporting and writing about Russia then, left him so blind to what was happening in American communities today within view of his new corner office in the World Trade Center.

It is the same kind of optical impairment, I suspect, that led Hillary Clinton to—perhaps fatally for her campaign—label Trump’s supporters as “Deplorables”. But that strain of myopia—or maybe they just need to get out more—isn’t an affliction idiosyncratic to the American left, nor are the real concerns and grievances that Trump rode into the Oval Office. Just as leaders in other Western democracies needed to take stock after Brexit, they will have to think carefully about the implications for America’s Brexit, not merely for what it means for world order but also for what it portends for the future of their own political class.

There are many things about the election that disturbed me, not least the personal bitterness and rancour; the explosion of fake news and Truther conspiracy theories, some of it of Pravda vintage newly re-tooled for Vladimir Putin’s digital assault on his strategic competitors; the Trump campaign’s embrace of what amounted to a digital Watergate break-in by Putin, evidently fenced by WikiLeaks creep Julian Assange; the dearth of serious policy analysis by the Fourth Estate (not that there was much policy on offer by either candidate); the enabling of Trump’s unicorn theories on trade by much of the media during the GOP primaries, no doubt because they believed it benefitted the Democrats to see Trump get one over on the other candidates; and then the unwillingness of much of the mainstream media to report critically but not hysterically when Trump won the nomination and posed a challenge to the chosen one, who herself benefitted from overwhelming media backing and bias.

But what concerned me most was the much-in-evidence elite scorn for the common man. In the 2008 election, then-candidate Obama put his finger on—if in an “unartful” way, as Hillary would say—what would undue his own legacy eight years later:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

It may seem contradictory, but for all of Trump’s excesses, confusedness and sheer guile, these so-called ‘bitter clingers’ thought he spoke in an honest and straightforward way to their concerns, and just enough voters in communities like theirs all across America were willing to trust him with their vote even if many didn’t really like him. Pennsylvania, the keystone of Hillary’s ‘Blue Wall’, came tumbling down along with Wisconsin and, at this writing, likely Michigan. It’s no Electoral College landslide, Trump will also not win a majority of the popular vote against a very weak and flawed candidate, and the Senate is closer to Democratic control after the loss of two Republican seats, but it’s no stretch to say that we are seeing a major re-alignment of politics in the US and the West with lasting implications.