At base, it's a backlash against neoliberalism.
The comparisons with Britain's Brexit vote are obvious: hordes of disaffected lower and middle class workers rebelling against their plight of being undercut by foreign nationals and left redundant by technological advance.
Rightly, they blame the insatiable greed of the neoliberals for first stripping away all protections - dismantling unions and price-subsidies, and extorting tax-free profits via so-called "free" trade - under Thatcher and Reagan (and Douglas/Richardson, here), and then relocating and outsourcing their livelihoods to cheap sweatshops and forges in third-world countries.
This was done - is still being done - with no sense of moral or ethical responsibility for the "home" citizens cast aside; the entire rationale is if there's a buck more in it, then it must be good.
Meanwhile the citizenry have been dumbed down with massaged "PR-news" and celebrity pap to the point even supposedly-intelligent folk are more apt to believe a wild conspiracy theory than a factual report, if the former is an "independent" internet post and the latter is carried by mainstream media.
But as I pointed out in July and has proved to be the case, a dumb voter is not a tame voter. It's a lethal combination which supports populists promising redemption but is instead resurrecting fascism.
What the working masses don't understand is that in the current "end-boom" global cycle of mass-produced commodity consumerism their fate as first-world forerunners was always to be left on the scrapheap.
As for UKIP in Britain, Trump may promise a rebirth but must fail to deliver; the massive inherent inequality that has built up under rampant neoliberalism will not be addressed until the system itself changes.
And in breaking the traditional "balanced" mould and retaining Republican power in Congress and Senate, US voters have set up a government with a reformist president at odds with his own party; the only way they can "change" is to go backwards.
Which they will: in women's rights, in racial equality, in climate change, in the whole lexicon of hate-fuelled fundamentalist repression.
That, on the face of it, the corporate takeover of national sovereignty proposed under the TPPA and TTIP looks to have been killed or at least stalled for four years is small comfort for a world fearful at having Trump's tiny fingers on the nuclear button.
The more-so because as history amply demonstrates, a populist denied sees only one route to lash out along: the path to war.
Make no mistake, this is a lurch back toward the darkness of nuclear winter. It could hardly have come at a worse time.
