Long before Trumpery actually has a chance to take the White House by storm, however, the blame game has begun. In the dock, indicted by friend and foe alike, is the Establishment. It is revealing that 21st-century Americans, of all people, should have latched onto this word, popularised in the 1950s by Henry Fairlie as a catch-all phrase to characterise the English ruling class — the antithesis, supposedly, of democracy in the America he later embraced. Sometimes this term is qualified, as in “the Republican Establishment”, but often it is used in a more general sense to indicate the ruling elites — social, economic and cultural — whose arrogance, greed and incompetence are blamed for the rise of Trumpery. The Establishment, it seems, is everything that Trumpery is not. It is rich, educated and cosmopolitan; the followers of Trump are poor, ignorant and nativist. Establishment Americans mostly live on the East or West coasts in colonies of globalised urbanity such as New York, Washington, San Francisco or Seattle. Trumpery flourishes in the contemptuously nicknamed “flyover states”, the struggling, small-town communities that are looked down on by the elites from a great height.

President Obama — who, as an alumnus of Harvard and Columbia, is the embodiment of the liberal Establishment — directed a throwaway comment at the lower orders that has become notorious: “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The Salon columnist David Masciotra has used the threat of Trump’s populism to defend “American elitism”, on the grounds that the rest are so ignorant that only the elites can keep the show on the road: “The politics of contemporary America accompany the illiteracy and ignorance of contemporary Americans with the symbiosis of flies and excrement.” Flies and excrement: if this is how the elites regard their compatriots, is it any wonder that Trumpery is in the ascendant among Republicans? And is it any surprise that the Democrats are losing disaffected blue-collar voters to Trump on a scale not seen since the Reagan era?

On the other side of the political divide, the libertarian Charles Murray has analysed with more sympathy and insight the despair of Middle America, abandoned by those ostensibly elected to represent it, and sinking to the bottom of a society now “coming apart”. In his recent Wall Street Journal essay “Trump’s America”, Murray argues that the white working class has every reason to be angry: it feels it has lost the national identity that was its birthright, resents an upper class that sneers at old-fashioned values, and wants the “American creed” it has lost back again. The rise of Trumpery is linked to this cultural pessimism of a generation that sees its children in danger of sliding down the scale into the underclass, panicked by a seemingly inexorable spread among the white majority of pathologies hitherto associated with minorities: the collapse of marriage, respect for the law and the work ethic.

The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has also analysed these pathologies in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). Putnam is more left-wing and less pessimistic than Murray, partly because he still believes in education as a cure for social immobility and decay. His main thesis is that class now divides America more seriously than race, with those lacking education now more hopelessly excluded from prosperity than ever before. That is certainly part of the background to the rise of Trumpery. But education is not the panacea it once was. Universities often act as engines of social privilege and political indoctrination, reinforcing the liberal elites in their contempt for those beneath them. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students from poorer and more conservative parts of America feel pressure to conform from their more liberal peers and professors. No wonder intellectual accomplishment has lost its prestige in the eyes of those who lack it.