This wouldn’t worry Bernie Sanders very much. The “democratic socialist” senator from Vermont voted against Nafta and the establishment of PNTR (permanent normal trade relations) with China, agreements that, he has said, have “cost millions of decent paying jobs”, a point of view that Trump, his counterpart on the Right, of course, shares. It is a measure of the depth of America’s malaise that it has spurred not one, but two, populist insurgencies. Lady Bracknell would not be impressed.

Never say never in 2016, but Sanders is almost certainly not going to be the Democrats’ candidate. As I write, the curmudgeonly old red has impressive momentum behind him (a winning streak of seven primaries and caucuses) and (astonishingly) raised more money (much of it, impressively, in small donations) in the first quarter than his rival. Nevertheless, Hillary ought to be able to maintain enough of a lead in delegates, buttressed by her command of “superdelegates”, party stalwarts who are appointed not elected, to hand her the nomination.

To be sure, Sanders’s unexpected strength will pull Clinton to the Left in ways yet to be seen. In the end, however, there’s a good chance that Sanders, or, more realistically, what he has set in motion (Sanders is 74) will matter even more as the years go by. He won 84 per cent of 18-29 year olds voting in the Democrats’ Iowa caucus (so much for the gender solidarity Clinton had been hoping for), and a similar share in the New Hampshire primary. In Illinois, Clinton’s home state, Sanders took 70 per cent of the under-45s. And the story is similar elsewhere. These are voters who are going to be around for a long time. Sanders notes proudly how his campaign has “brought out . . . young people”. Even if he loses, he promises, “we will continue that revolution.” He’s old enough to remember how McCarthy’s ultimately unsuccessful run in 1968 paved the way for the selection of George McGovern in 1972, an event that transformed the Democratic Party. And, well-schooled leftist that he is, Sanders undoubtedly knows what Gramsci said about the long march through the institutions.

Sanders is being spun as a social democrat of sorts, but he’s more of a Corbyn than a happier America would have time for. Pollster Nate Silver argues that, at least when it comes to the politics of redistribution, Sanders is to the left of his young supporters. That could well be true but the train on which they have jumped may take them to a destination that they may not now expect.

That they jumped on that train in the first place owes much to Sanders’s grumpy grandpa appeal, but it is best read as an indication of the bleak view that millennials have of their future. Sanders, like Trump, scores well with “angry white men” mourning the lost jobs of the past, but the lost jobs of the future may, politically, come to count for more, especially as technology eats its way higher and higher up the food chain. Yesterday’s unemployed autoworker is tomorrow’s unemployed engineer. The pessimism of the young, many burdened with student debt that they will struggle to repay, about their prospects is justified — and that is unlikely to leave them with much affection for the status quo.

President Hillary Clinton will be bad enough. Her successor could well be even worse.