It has happened again. As years in politics go, this one is going to take some beating. We now have a man who represents everything I despise leading the most powerful nation on Earth. He was put there by… it’d be all too easy to say morons. And having seen some of his rallies and the kind of people who attended them, that’s in part true. Many of them are so stupid it makes me wince.

But that’s not the whole picture, nor is it a fair one. ‘My’ side has our own idiots, they’re just of a different type. The people who think we should accept Islamic extremism as just another set of views. The ones who’ll compare NATO to ISIS with a straight face. People like Jessica Valenti, who recently wrote an article for The Guardian expressing her surprise that some men aren’t sexual predators. The more-liberal-than-thous, the one-issue movements that have more in common with the crusades than they do with suffrage.

Those views aren’t ‘progressive’, although you can bet your arm the people holding them call themselves ‘progressives’. They’re idiotic. Just as much so as those held by the honking rubes who were Trump’s loudest advocates. Valenti’s faux-feminist antagonism is no different from the squit-so-hard-it-hurts incoherence of Ann Coulter. Both undermine equality and tolerance, harming their own purported movements, just from very different positions.

So while we can’t and shouldn’t ignore these groups, we can for the moment discount them. They’ve always been there. They’ll likely always be there. But they don’t win elections on their own. So how the hell do I explain – to myself, let alone anyone else – how we’re where we are now?

The demographics of ‘The West’ are very far from what I believed them to be. People like me are clearly in the minority. The liberal secularists, the moderate progressives. My innate perspective bias toward thinking myself typical of the norm was just that; a biased perspective. It is well-intended, motivated by fairness and compassion, but perhaps fundamentally lacking in some way. Of course, I believe it is better thought out, more moral and nuanced than that of the angry tide we’re seeing now. And I think I’m justified in believing that – but then I would, wouldn’t I?

What I’m coming to realise is I’m just another kind of Fabian; I sympathise, but I don’t understand the depth of the anger because, quite simply, I don’t ever bear the brunt of the burden. My view of anti-establishment reform is more that of an academic. My disgust at exploitation and inequality is moral, aesthetic. It is not that of someone who directly suffers those injustices. My anger is more indignance than outrage. It is from a position of relative safety and privilege.

I can afford to see taxes taken from my pay cheque and think it fair enough, because I am still left with enough to live. Not just survive, to scrape by, but to pursue interests and hobbies. How resentful would I be if that were not the case? How angry would I be if I worked all hours doing something I hated, just to earn barely enough to continue doing so? And how would I act if, in such a situation, I realised I had nothing much to lose in tearing everything down in the hope of ending that cycle?

But it’s more complicated than simply different values and opportunities. Many of the people with whom I differ most strongly share my values. I doubt most people vote with a mind of racism or hate to motivate them. I imagine they, just like me, also want to see more fairness, less exploitation, an equality of hope. It isn’t that they wouldn’t do things ‘nicely’ if that was an option. It’s that it isn’t an option for them at all. They don’t have the luxury of patience that is born of moderate comfort.

So yes, we can disregard the opinions of bigots and lunatics, but we must still account for the rest. What I suspect will turn out to be the ‘shy Trump voter’, the people who voted for Brexit because they’re just sick to death of how things are going. They may only have got over the finishing line with the support of the racists and homophobes and morons, which is sad. But then perhaps ‘my’ side of things only ever get over that line with the same sort of assistance, just from our own variety of deplorable.

In all this, what we must not forget is that as it is for the details, so it is for the bigger picture. Western society has rebelled against the injustices of its elites, its 1%. With this fervour on the loose, why should we think the rest of the world will not follow suit? Because, in the eyes of much of the world, we are the privileged elite. Russia cannot be happy with feeling side-lined after the fall of the Soviet Union. China cannot enjoy being lectured on social ethics by people who did the same things to get themselves into the position to lecture in the first place. Africa and South America still bear the wounds of exploitation, both by traditional colonial imperialism and the more modern globalist kind.

So what does all this mean? In some ways, this may offer the best hope for my anti-establishment beliefs seeing some sort of realisation. Do I accept where we are and get behind the general sentiment? Should I hope that, whatever seismic shift and hardships along the way, we will see a restructuring of the world for the better? I don’t know.

And I don’t know because it’s not just about accepting where we are. It’s about how we got here. That’s a more complex question, because it’s about action and reaction. Has there been a spate of populist nationalism, rich with fear and anger and resentment? Yes. But that was grown in the fertile dirt of an unfair system that disenfranchised huge parts of our society. And, if we’re honest, being nice about it got us nowhere. The whole Occupy movement made a peaceful stand and, other than a few headlines, was ignored. It achieved nothing.

Given this, is it a surprise that many of those who’d usually have been there to oppose Brexit, to vote down Trump, decided they were powerless or that doing things nicely wasn’t working? No. Because that’s an entirely rational response to trying those things and achieving nothing. So it would be equally rational to expect others, on the big-picture scale, to take similar steps if they see the chance.

Perhaps we should take some solace in the fact that the vanguard of social change was civilised, morally-minded people. As a society, our first reaction was to seek to open peaceful dialogue and reasoned debate. But that won no battles and now the cavalry have arrived. They’re not as nice. They’re not peaceful. They aren’t interested in doing things the civilised, morally-minded way. They just want much-needed change.

So just as much as we can take that solace, we must also accept with regret that it carried a kind of respect that wasn’t reciprocated by the elites. It has apparently taken a much more primal approach to shake the foundations. But this is trying to address the wrong things. Instead of enforcing a more accountable socio-economic system, it fears the outsider and shuts us in on ourselves. We may win our change, but it risks being a change away from one kind of injustice to another.

It may be that I am one day left with guilty gratitude towards what is happening now. Maybe it will make things more fair, less top-down and divided. But what cost will we pay for reaching a point where this was what it took? Because the truth is, whatever ends we reach, I cannot in my heart accept the means we seem to be using to get there. Nor the fact that was what it took to do so.

I am left thinking of two famous comments. The first is Gandhi’s beautiful moral call to “be the change you wish to see in the world”. It is a wonderful, concise, easily understandable expression of the Golden Rule, to treat others how we wish to be treated ourselves. The second is a variation on this, from Sartre’s brilliant lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, given in the wake of World War 2:

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men.

The way we choose to act – not just the ends towards which that action is oriented – is a kind of vote. In fact, it is the most important vote of all, the most absolute realisation of democracy we can ever engage in. And right now, I fear we are choosing very poorly indeed.