A Trumpified American politics would introduce something that has long existed in Europe but rarely in the United States: class-based parties. This is not solely due to Trump: The major American political parties have slowly been evolving away from being loose coalitions of competing interests to being ideologically rigid entities, this phenomenon being both a cause and a consequence of our ever-increasing partisan polarization. Since all humans have a tendency to rationalize pursuing their interests on the basis of some high-minded belief, ideological polarization was fertile ground for class-based polarization.

Yes, America’s racial divisions mean it’s hard to imagine working-class African Americans voting en masse for Trump in the way white American working-class voters have just because he has a pro-working-class agenda. But even on this score, it should be noted that Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among minorities. Presumably a Trump 2.0 figure who made a merit- and assimilation-based argument for immigration restrictionism and refrained from calling Mexican judges unqualified and referring to African Americans as “the blacks,” while keeping the anti-corporate, anti-trade, pro-worker rhetoric, could win even more minority votes — far from a majority of them, but enough to deny a Democratic candidate or party a majority.