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Donald Trump is the poster child for this hegemonic crisis. But we cannot understand his ascent unless we clarify the conditions that enabled it. That means identifying the worldview that Trumpism displaced and charting the process through which it unraveled. The indispensable ideas for this purpose come from Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony is his term for the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presup- positions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole. Its organizational counterpart is the hege- monic bloc: a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assem- bles and through which it asserts its leadership. If they hope to challenge these arrangements, the dominated classes must construct a new, more per- suasive common sense, or counterhege- mony, and a new, more powerful political alliance, or counterhegemonic bloc.