The premise of so much of the Democrats’ political campaigning in 2015 appears to be that the white male working class that is drifting towards Donald Trump is simply another constituency to be added to the rest. Both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns seem currently to be treating that addition as ultimately a simple and straightforward one, because neither campaign seems willing to concede that, at the bottom of the US income ladder, the immediate economic interests of groups do not naturally align. It is an error of analysis that Trump does not share with them, and it is one that may yet let Trump in.

If they are going to stop Donald Trump in his tracks, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders need to build their 2016 campaigns on the explicit recognition that, as American capitalism is currently organized, different sections of the American poor and near-poor do compete with one another for limited resources (for jobs, wages and welfare benefits); and that in consequence there is an explicit strategic choice to be offered to those various constituencies in November – and particularly to the angry ones. It is either for potential voters to go on treating each other as competitors to be defeated/excluded – the Trump way – or it is to come together – the progressive way – in a joint endeavor to reform a system that sets similarly-placed people in such fierce competition with each other.

The politics of exclusion are the politics of Trump. The politics of inclusion have to be ours. Donald Trump may be promising to make America great again, but he is not promising to remove the competition between ethnic groups at the bottom of the US class structure for a limited set of employment opportunities and social resources. He is not, but progressives must: for unless the American Left can demonstrate how its policies, and its alone, can raise all ships, right-wing populists like Donald Trump will continue to play group against group, to the long-term mutual disadvantage of them all.