At this historic turning point, it is the dispossessed who hold the power

Changes in industry have left great swathes of people without community or work, and politicians must not discount them

We are about to discover whether the Italian electorate has joined the Great People’s Rebellion. Beppe Grillo, a professional comedian and amateur politician, may be about to put Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, out of power. If Mr Renzi’s constitutional reform referendum is lost, then he and his government are finished – and he will have been removed by yet another populist uprising led by an inexperienced outsider.

In fact, Mr Grillo has been on the political scene fractionally longer than that other amateur politician, Donald Trump, who has now become his role model.

Leading his Five Star movement on its crusade against established power, Mr Grillo offers a rather more poetic account of his mission than the demotic American presidentelect: “Today saying ‘No’ is the most beautiful and glorious form of politics…” he has said. Alas, he then ended with a more Trumplike conclusion: “…whoever doesn’t understand that can go screw themselves.”

Goodness knows, there are an awful lot of people who do not seem to understand it. In the United States, the Democrats in Congress have just re-elected Nancy Pelosi as their leader, a smug San Francisco liberal who embodies everything that the country has decided that it loathes.

What is worse, her position was being contested by a Midwestern Democratic Congressman who just might have given the party a chance to reconnect with the Middle America from which it has become so fatally detached. How is the angry, non-liberal population to read this decision other than as a calculated insult: an act of arrogant disregard for their concerns that is utterly in keeping with the dismissive attitude they have come to expect from the Clinton-Pelosi governing clique?

But let’s come back to Europe and the rise of populism in Italy, France and Austria, which may be about to change the EU political landscape in ways that will make everything now being said about the Brexit negotiations irrelevant.

There are lots of people on this side of the Atlantic (many of them with important posts in Brussels) who don’t seem to understand, either. This phenomenon is much bigger and far more profound than the belligerent pronouncements of EU spokesmen suggest. It is not simply a whimsical rejection of governing establishments, or of a self-serving political class, or of international bankers, or even of uncontrolled immigration. It is a turning point of historic proportions, on a par with the industrial revolution that ripped through the old communal ties and social hierarchies of advanced countries in ways that altered politics for a century. In fact, it is the mirror image of that event: the reversing and undoing of it.

What we are seeing now is the impact of post-industrialisation: the end of the age when a whole social edifice could be built on the existence of manufacturing based on manual labour. The tumultuous change that – in Britain first and later in the rest of Europe – took most of the population off the land and put it into factories is winding down.

In the metropolitan citadels there is a faint glimmering of the reality that has destroyed the cohesive communities that are now so helplessly enraged. But that faint recognition is too mixed up with snobbery and indifference to be any use. On the face of it, this seems to be a cultural dispute between people who need no ties to origins or geographical place, who see such sentiments as limiting and small-minded – and those who have rootedness and community at the centre of their lives.

But the two ways of living have not always been in such open conflict: they managed to coexist in a state of only mild dislike during happier times. The metropolitan lifestyle that put personal liberation and fulfilment at the top of its priorities and sneered quietly at provincial limitations could, until quite recently, go its way without provoking fury (as long as it maintained a paternalistic concern for the oiks in those nowhere places). So why is it being set upon and ripped to pieces now?

Because the old rooted communities were once sustained by the old industries: the coal mines and the steel works, and in the US the Rust Belt manufacturing plants, provided not just jobs, but the bonds that held the families and the generations together. The coal miners’ expectation that not only would they have jobs for life but that their sons would be able to follow them down the pits was one of the great explosive points of conflict in the Eighties’ British industrial relations wars. The decline or outright loss of this mass employment – with all its communal significance – in vast regions of the Western world is a social earthquake, and in democratic societies the people have a very convenient way to express their despair.

In Italy there is an even more extreme voice than Mr Grillo’s to express this discontent. Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-Right Northern League, has described the Trump election as a strike against globalisation: “the revenge of the people… [a victory for] the desire for work and security”.

Revenge against what? Against a global political and financial conspiracy that writes off millions of people who were once self-respecting workers in proud communities? Against an insouciant club of prosperous “citizens of the world” who delight in their ability to reinvent themselves at will, making use of whatever resources are to hand for their own convenience, but whose personal freedom looks like narcissism from a town whose factory has closed?

At first, the closure of the factories meant diaspora: the young would leave their families behind to go wherever there was a possibility of using their skills. It was just a matter of geography. Then the raw materials that were once produced in their towns and villages became globalised: in Mr Trump’s favourite example, cheap steel from China replaced the higher wage steel production of the American Midwest, so travel within the country became pointless.

Then the skills themselves became redundant. Soon, there will be precious little manual work that cannot be done by robots or by migrating Third World tribes of cheap labour. It is software located in a cloud – not hardware that is bound to a location – that dominates the job markets now. The idea of a community built around a local workplace will be gone forever.

So, you might say, if this is the economic reality of the future then we must accept it. We will all have to learn to be insular – free to go where the prosperity is (isn’t that what today’s economic migrants are doing?) – and to define ourselves outside of hidebound, inherited communities.

Maybe so. But before we rush to embrace that new world, just think for a moment of what we will lose: a sense of shared identity, of belonging to something like an extended family which will endure after we’re gone, and the belief in values that are more than fashionable tropes.

Think especially of how this threatens democracy, which always works best on a small scale where it is trusted and accessible. It is the collapse of that trust and accessibility which is what the more articulate populists decry.

The politicians of the EU and the US federal government are taking a spectacular beating at the moment for something that may not be entirely their own fault: the technology of the age has dispossessed great swathes of the populations in Western developed countries. With a bit more genuine sympathy and generosity, those politicians might help to save their own necks – and the institutions they say they are so concerned to preserve.