Today, false symbolism is all. "Identity" is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatised millions of voters as "a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it". Her abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over minorities by abusing a white mostly working-class majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that "for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life".

No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among today's insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described "the arts of dominating other people... of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital".

There is something both venal and profoundly stupid about famous writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace an "issue". Across the Review section of the Guardian on 10 December was a dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words, "Amazing Grace" and "Farewell the Chief".

The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook through page after page. "He was a vulnerable figure in many ways ... But the grace. The all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and intellect, with humour and cool ... [He] is a blazing tribute to what has been, and what can be again ... He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a formidable champion to have on our side ... ... The grace ... the almost surreal levels of grace ..."

I have conflated these quotes. There are others even more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian's chief apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to mitigate, to say that his hero "could have done more": oh, but there were the "calm, measured and consensual solutions..."

None of them, however, could surpass the American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the recipient of a "genius" grant worth $625,000 from a liberal foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlanticentitled, "My President Was Black", Coates brought new meaning to prostration. The final "chapter", entitled "When You Left, You Took All of Me With You", a line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas "rising out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity". The Ascension, no less.

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, who expanded America's favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads ("special operations") as no other president has done since the Cold War.