From Shoreditch to Sevenoaks, from cool young things in edgy East London all the way home to their suburban mums and dads in cosy Kent, British citizens are horrified at the prospect of Trump for President.

Not that they are unduly exercised by the plight of the American people. Through their horrified expressions they are sending themselves a re-assuring message; signalling that their own life world is wholesome enough not to admit Donald Trump – neither to Shoreditch House nor to the golf club.

‘Only in America,’ they say. But ‘America’ here means that country of excess which is populated by excessive numbers of working class people. In this context, the familiar bits of business to do with Anglo-American misunderstanding, e.g. the one about two cultures divided by a common language, is really more to do with traditional middle class disdain for the working class, especially when the latter is apprehended in the vicinity of the polling booth.

Thus the spectre of Trump now haunting Britain’s middle classes, is drawn from their recurring fear of the masses, currently personified in the Middle American masses who seem to have fallen in love with him.

Accordingly, in the case of Trumphobia versus Trumphilia both sides are largely mythological and partly pathological.

But to those well-versed in the ‘morbid symptoms’ of capitalist society, this is a familiar pattern – as old as Antonio Gramsci’s original use of the term, not far from a century ago.

Moreover, repetition of the familiar tends to provoke a correspondingly familiar response, such as: where there is bourgeois myth, let there be left-wing demystification. But at a time and in a place where the value of ‘fictitious’, i.e. mythical, capital, is higher than that of the ‘real’ economy, setting the matter straight by means of an age-old reality check, is likely to prove…unrealistic. read more