There has been much concern and speculation about the roots of Trump’s support, certainly an issue of deep and I suspect lasting cultural significance. Let me contribute to these reflections, by offering a few historically focused observations.

The right-wing corporate offensive in the US began in earnest in the early seventies, with a coordinated institutional buildup around a growing Neo-Liberal campaign, featuring globalization, deregulation, relatively unconstrained free market liberalization, systematic tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, and attacks on the social wage, social safety net, etc. All well detailed in Hacker and Pearson’s incisive “Winner Take All Politics.”

This built on the Southern evangelical base – itself the historical legacy of Southern slave culture – that was mobilized after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and ultimately funded and guided by the Koch brothers (see Nancy McLean’s brilliant “Democracy in Chains.” The Democratic Establishment essentially capitulated to this Neo-Liberal attack on the “welfare state”, first with Carter, against his initial program, and then more systematically with Clinton and Obama, both essentially trying to go so far as to undercut Social Security. (See Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal.”)

Among other things, one of the major consequences of this Neo-Liberal policy, identified with and benefitting primarily the urban educated elites of the coast, has been the deindustrialization of much else, particularly small town and rural America, the so-called “heartland”, etc., resulting in the reality so painfully detailed by Deaton and Case in “Deaths of Despair,” the vast increases in drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide in small town essentially white America over the last 40+ years.

And then all they seem to hear from progressives is concern for black and brown people, for immigrants, claims that they are the beneficiaries of “white privilege,” and demands for “political correctness.” None of which sounds at all sensitive to their suffering. These observations obviously do not provide a complete explanation. But they are, I believe, essential components of the neo-fascist counter movement to the perceived establishment main stream, by which they feel betrayed, sold our, and deeply resentful. It has produced Trump, sustains Trump and, I fear, Trumpism, and does not bode well for our democratic future.