Australia just experienced an election result just as surprising and depressing as the 2016 presidential election in America. The parallels are stunning.  How did the conservatives defy the polls and the consensus of the experts and hold onto power? You’re not going to like the answer.

First, the left lost the fight over climate change and spurred a backlash of deplorables:

And yet the path to victory for Scott Morrison, the incumbent prime minister, will make agreeing on a response more difficult. He and his Liberal-National coalition won thanks not just to their base of older, suburban economic conservatives, but also to a surge of support in Queensland, the rural, coal-producing, sparsely populated state sometimes compared to the American South…

…In some ways it was a clash of cultures as well as political views.

“I feel like there’s quite a lot of scorn about the way Queenslanders feel about environmental issues, and that doesn’t help,” said Susan Harris-Rimmer, a law professor at Griffith University in Queensland. “The predominant Queensland characteristic is pride and you can’t pour scorn on them.”

She said doing so was a strategic mistake for politicians comparable to Hillary Clinton’s description of some Donald Trump supporters as “deplorables” during the 2016 United States presidential election.

“You can’t trigger the pride response,” Ms. Harris-Rimmer said.

Then the left lost the fight over diversity and immigration:

Mr. Morrison’s coalition also benefited from deals with two right-wing groups: One Nation, the anti-immigration party led by the Queensland senator Pauline Hanson, and the United Australia Party led by the mining billionaire Clive Palmer, who spent tens of millions of dollars on a populist campaign with the slogan “Make Australia Great.”

Finally, the elite left was punished for losing touch with the lower middle class:

Scholars of Australian populism agree, arguing that the weakening of the major parties and the country’s tilt to the right have been driven mainly by class envy and alienation, including the belief that the elite do not understand the needs and values of the working class.

Despite his Sydney upbringing and former career in advertising, Mr. Morrison, 51, won in part by presenting himself as an Australian everyman — a rugby-crazed beer drinker who was the first prime minister to campaign in a baseball hat.

Someone once asked the singer Joe Cocker why he quit doing drugs. If I remember his answer correctly, he said, “You can only bang your head against a wall for so long before it hurts.”

The global left has to offer a solution to rival fascism to the lower middle class or fascism will continue to rise and consolidate its power by establishing state-to-state relationships. The strategy of insulting them and spurning them for their reactionary beliefs and reprobate leaders has not been working.