It would be a mistake to interpret the 2016 election solely as Clinton’s loss. Trump brought assets to the Republican ticket that Mitt Romney did not have in 2012, and ratified a party-building strategy which, while vital to the gop for decades, had not been fully realized at the presidential level until now. The problem for Romney as a vote-rustler, aside from being an über-representative of the moneyed class, was that his politics of nostalgia was not rooted in anything real—the precarity of people’s lives, their felt experience of economic decline and social quicksand. Nor would he go the extra step to tap the dangerous gas of emotion that historically has fuelled the energies of anxious white people. Romney had no believable way of reaching masses of people at the point of their insecurity.

What Trump has that Romney didn’t is proximity to life beyond the metropolitan suites, or at least the memory of it. His father had taught him the importance of getting close to the grit of building, and from his earliest days in the business Trump spent time talking to contractors, labourers, petty managers, electricians. He learned to accommodate the volatility of a bigoted managing agent in Ohio as easily as the condescension of a banker in New York. He paid attention to their language, and knew how to get what he wanted despite or because of it. Much of the gop’s 2012 convention was an exercise in fear-mongering, but no one would say outright just whom everyone should be scared of. It was clear then to anyone paying attention that if your subject is decline, but you can’t identify any economic source of it because you’re committed to redistribution upward; if one of your sturdiest weapons is fear, but you’re too polite to unleash the racist, nativist ammunition; if your party is divided, but you have no strategy for unifying it or forging a different coalition that can outstrip it—then you’re going to lose. For Romney, winning was impossible. Trump was different. He knew that white nostalgia was not simply for the small town, lined with small businesses that might become big businesses. He knew that white insecurity has never been just about economics. He tapped the gas, and won 2 million more votes than Romney had.

Trump tapped the gas from his first trial balloon as a standard bearer of birtherism, to delegitimize Obama, and from the first moment of his presidential announcement, talking about Mexicans as rapists and criminals. Then he tarred Muslims. Trump caricatured the source of decline with the tools that left-liberal and trade-union politics had already forged: trade deals. He appealed to people where deindustrialization had seriously accelerated under his ‘Make America Great’ inspiration, Ronald Reagan, and he blasted Clinton and nafta for it. It was untrue, or only partly or superficially true, but it was something. He watched Sanders and he echoed him. And to Sanders’ bleached economic argument, Trump added the foreign menace. He went to enclaves that presidential candidates never visit and his utterances about ‘devastation’ resonated, especially with white people in counties that are racially isolated, where mortality rates among whites aged 45 to 54 have spiked, and social mobility among youth has flat-lined. (Those socio-geographic features, according to a pre-election Gallup analysis of 125,000 adults, were the greatest predictors of a Trump supporter, after being white, male, heterosexual, conservative and Christian.footnote¹) Then Trump fed red meat to audiences nourished for decades on rage, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and faux populism by a right-wing sound machine of millionaire shock jocks and their less well-heeled pretenders, who dominate the radio waves. And he did it with no apology, no evasion.

Trump’s echt supporter was not the poorest or most precarious straight white man. He was not the most likely to be unemployed, underemployed, competing with immigrants, living amidst the ruins of factories, or the most susceptible to the whiplash of global trade. Microdata from that Gallup survey put his mean household income at $81,898. Far from the proletariat of media typecasting, this ‘white working class’ is as likely to include business owners or managers as it is foremen or skilled workers in construction, production, installation, transportation, machine maintenance and repair. More likely to be over forty, more likely to receive disability or other Social Security payments, unlikely to have accumulated wealth that is not leveraged or to have got much if any post-secondary education, his is a profile in disappointment: the low-boil blues of one who almost made it, but not quite.

Perhaps sick of ‘playing by the rules’, as his betters have always exhorted, and having so little to show for it, this voter was drawn to the man who could say anything, do anything, and get away with it. America has always loved its outlaws. The Gallup survey says next to nothing about motivation, and even if asked, people might not have told the truth. Exit polls show that nationally, Clinton won voters who said the economy was their top issue by 10 points. They suggest that what Trump voters wanted most was some generalized shake-up, ‘change’, a word with as many meanings as the people who invoke it. Change could be the reason for the touted paradox of the Obama voter now supporting Trump. On election night outside Trump’s victory party in Manhattan, though, change meant the defeat of Obama, as enthusiasts chanted the final date of his second term as if he’d been on the ballot, and one man marched around shouting, ‘White power!’

Anecdote is not explanation, but neither is analgesic talk of trade or the economy. If the working class was the determinant on November 8—the whites who backed Trump, the blacks and Latinos who did not surge for Clinton, the union households who gave the Democrat candidate the smallest advantage (8 per cent) since 1984—then its alienation from itself and the ways both parties relate to that are arguably the momentous issues of the election. This working class without ‘the class’, with little ideological consciousness of itself, no coherent politics and diminishing organization, is hardly new; but against the spectre of Muslim bans and intensified state machinery to round up undocumented workers, its divisions are newly dangerous, especially for designated scapegoats—but also for itself.

To take the Trump voters first, it is dishonest to pussyfoot around bigotry as vital to their man’s appeal. It is also no use assuming that all 62.9 million of them—the highest number in Republican history—are virulent haters. More likely, and more difficult politically, most are probably typical white Americans who historically haven’t let discrimination get in the way. Their forebears, metaphorically speaking, lived with legalized racism, segregation, unequal wages, chauvinism and violence of one sort or another; they followed leaders who validated that reality; and, taken up with their own problems, they didn’t give much thought to the notion that accommodating themselves to the myriad oppressions of others also disciplined them, limited them, depleted them.