Trumpism could be a solution to the crisis of neoliberalism

There is Keynesian merit in Trump's policies which challenge the neoliberal obsession with deficits and debt reduction. Liberals need to question and refine the plan, not dismiss it as ignorant ravings

The Republican establishment has gone into overdrive to present President-elect Donald Trump as a guarantor of continuity. Of course, he is nothing of the sort. He campaigned against the political establishment, and, as he told a pre-election rally, a victory for him would be a "Brexit plus, plus, plus". With two political earthquakes within months of each other, and more sure to follow, we may well agree with the verdict of France's ambassador to the United States: the world as we know it "is crumbling before our eyes".

The last time this seemed to be happening was the era of the two world wars, 1914 to 1945. The sense then of a "crumbling" world was captured by WB Yeats's 1919 poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." With the traditional institutions of rule thoroughly discredited by the war, the vacuum of legitimacy would be filled by powerful demagogues and populist dictatorships: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity." Oswald Spengler had the same idea in his Decline of the West, published in 1918.

Related: We are living in a depression - that's why Trump took the White House

The second coming of liberalism represented by Roosevelt, Keynes, and the founders of the European Union has been destroyed by the economics of globalisation: the pursuit of an ideal equilibrium through the free movement of goods, capital, and labour, with its conjoined tolerance of financial criminality, obscenely lavish rewards for a few, high levels of unemployment and underemployment, and curtailment of the state's role in welfare provision. The resulting inequality of economic outcomes strips away the democratic veil that hides from the majority of citizens the true workings of power.

Related: Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump's triumph | George Monbiot