I’m a journalist and metropolitan liberal, so I’m one of what Donald Trump would call the “biggest losers” of his election. My class and profession missed his rise, then wrote him off. “The electorate generally just wants a leader who appears sane, which is why Republicans almost certainly won’t nominate Trump,” I wrote in December. So how will my loser tribe live and work in the era of Trump?

Being an irredeemable cosmopolitan snob, I feel I’m now reliving Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. In part, it’s about the demise of the European aristocracy. The main characters are the German aristocrat Von Rauffenstein, commander of a prisoner-of-war camp in the first world war, and the French toff de Boeldieu, his prisoner — but, really, the two are twins. They chat in multiple languages about their dying class. As Von Rauffenstein tells de Boeldieu: “I don’t know who will win this war but, whatever the outcome, it will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.” 

My class, too, was in demise even before Trump. Economic change was already pushing journalists, academics, people in the arts, NGO staff etc down into lower-middle-class bohemia. When Trump calls us “the liberal elite”, it’s actually flattering.