It is now a matter of days before Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. People are still trying to understand and come to terms with his confounding election victory. His supporters are happy and excited about the future — unfazed by pesky details like their candidate’s loss (by some 2.9 million votes) in the popular vote-count, or the apparent cyber meddling by Russia to influence the election's outcome. His opponents remain shell-shocked and uncomprehending: how could an inexperienced and crude narcissist, given to prevarication and tall claims laced with racism, sexism or religious bigotry, get popularly elected to the most powerful office in the world?

To this everyone agrees: 2016 has been the year of western political discontent. The discontent has led to popular revolt across countries and continents — from the British decision to exit the European Union (Brexit) to the election of Trump to the US presidency and the effective ouster of Matteo Renzi as Italy’s Prime Minister after his defeat in a referendum on constitutional amendment. The discontent could spill over to 2017 and profoundly affect the French presidential election (April-May) and the German federal election (sometime in the fall) for the Bundestag and the chancellorship.

As regards the reason for this discontent, analysts are coalescing around a basic understanding: the elections and referenda of 2016 have been a repudiation of the neoliberal governing agenda that has largely prevailed around the globe since the fall of Communism (1989) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991). Two pillars of the neoliberal governing concept, one economic and the other political, have both come under fierce attack by a large body of disaffected citizenry. The economic idea — based on free market, low tariff and minimal regulation for the movement of goods and capital across national borders — has led (in conjunction with technological advances and robotics) to job losses and wage stagnation among the working class in the West. The political concept of relatively free movement of labour across national borders, enshrined most notably in the Schengen agreement of the EU which largely abolished border controls among member states, led to strains — first ethnic (Polish plumbers allegedly descending on London and Paris) and then cultural (Syrian refugees boating into Greece and effectively wading into EU). These strains have put the Schengen agreement on life support and sprung Britain loose from the EU. The American counterparts to these strains have been the rise of income inequality and the hot-button issue of illegal and undocumented immigrants from Mexico — concerns which contributed heavily to the surprise triumph of Trump.

While this analysis would explain why the citizens of UK and USA voted against their ruling elites’ recommendations in last year’s elections, it does not quite explain the durable appeal of a mendacious brawler and schoolyard bully like Trump to a large segment of the US population. One looks instead for an explanation through historical parallels with charismatic leaders and strongmen of the past. Not surprisingly, many people have compared Trump’s rise to that of authoritarian leaders from recent European history. In a surprising and intriguing twist, though, two Indian born authors have lately attempted to understand and interpret the Trump phenomenon in the context of characters and events from contemporary India.

Suketu Mehta has looked at Trump’s campaign and found parallels with the rise to power of the Shiv Sena “Supremo”, Bal Thackeray, in Bombay of his childhood. In Mr. Mehta’s reckoning, Bal Thackeray “rode to power on a wave of outrageous stories, bluster, lies, bigotry and showmanship.” He was masterly at hurling catchy epithets at his opponents, much like Trump, and had assorted and changing targets (Communists, South Indians, Muslims) for his vitriol. Thackeray’s support base was working-class Maharashtrians who “felt excluded from booming Bombay,” just as Trump’s major support base is working-class whites in America who feel left out of the benefits of globalisation.

Pankaj Mishra, on the other hand, has looked at the succession of democratically elected strongmen, “Erdogan, Putin and now Trump,” and decided that the first whiff of stench in the state of democracy was “unmistakable in India in May 2014, when Narendra Modi, a member of an alt-right Hindu organisation inspired by fascists and Nazis, was elected prime minister.” He pins the blame on a “global network of elites” for trying to “restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market” — his overtly polemical description of neoliberal economics — the failure of which has led to the “incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.”

The comparison of the US political situation with India’s has its limits, of course, and no one would seriously imply that either Bal Thackeray or Narendra Modi somehow anticipated the success of Donald Trump. But the path Trump took for his ascent overlap with theirs — appealing as he did to the sentiments of the country’s White majority in both economic and ethno-cultural terms (impose high import duties, dissolve free trade agreements, build a border wall to stop illegal immigration from Mexico, temporarily bar entry to Muslims, and so on). A very similar playbook, tailored to the Indian condition, was used by both Shiv Sena and BJP in their rise to power.

The dilemma now facing the progressive forces in the USA concerns how best to react to their electoral drubbing. Do they double down on their current focus on improving the condition of disempowered (and often minority) groups — be they based on race or gender or sexual orientation — or do they respond in some fashion to the majoritarian wishes on economic and social conditions implicit in the electoral outcome? Or, to put in crudely, are the Trump supporters irredeemably racist or do some of their sentiments have merit and should be accommodated without leading inevitably to the “tyranny of the majority.”

Immediately after the November elections in the US, Mark Lilla of Columbia University wrote an influential article, titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” where he spoke of the American liberalism in recent years having “slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” He was vilified shortly thereafter by a colleague for doing the “nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable. Again.” Out of this debate, now just joined, will emerge the future direction of the American Left. While the situation in India is different, it would be interesting to see how the Indian Left handles its own identity politics (based on caste, tribe and religion) and builds a viable coalition as it electorally confronts a confident Narendra Modi and the BJP some two years from now.

The writer is former Professor of Physics, University of Maryland, and is now based in New Jersey.