The tragedy of Donald Trump is that his erratic behavior almost continuously obscures the fact that he has brought into the light the wrenching collapse of the white underclass and its resulting contempt for our media and political system. Our media utterly failed to see this coming, and has yet to fully understand or explain it.

While Trump supporters are many and diverse, survey after survey has found that disaffected working class whites are the core of his movement.

If you want to understand why there is a Trump so close to the White House rather than simply fret about it, I’d  recommend a fascinating best-selling book I read this week by J.D. Vance, it’s called Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis.

These are the people we see at those rallies cheering wildly at Trump’s speeches for forgiving him his trespasses. These are the people who see the champion they have been waiting for. They can’t wait for him to blow up – or shake up – the system that has cast them aside.

Vance, 31, is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a practicing attorney.

He is a self-described hillbilly, his family came from Kentucky and moved early in his life to Middletown, Ohio.

Hillbilly Elegy is a thoughtful and compassionate analysis of the white underclass that has been moving towards rebellion while journalists and politicians were focused almost exclusively on the liberation and social movements now shaping, even dominating,  American culture – African-Americans, women, techno-geeks, Latinos, gays and lesbians, trans people and immigrants.

Our elected leaders somehow failed to notice that white working-class Americans were falling into despair, suffering shorter live spans, endemic unemployment, runaway drug addiction, growing poverty and climbing suicide rates. In many ways, they are in as much trouble as any other embattled minority.

“I began to see the world as Mamaw (Vance’s grandmother) did.,” writes Vance. “I was scared, confused, angry and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problems worse.”

All the while Vance saw the disintegration of families, epidemic drug and alcohol addiction, brutal violence, and deepening poverty all building around him, engulfing the white industrial working class. The men of Vance’s world were proud of their good factory and mill jobs, and the stable life they brought. Today, there are no good jobs left in these towns,  the unions are bleeding to death, there are only struggling and shell-shocked people.

A culture that had rejected traditional journalism and conventional politics and is suspicious of authority was ripe for a demagogue to come along, fan the flames, and speak more directly and intuitively to them than anyone ever had, just at the moment of their greatest distress.

It was a perfect storm, each looking for the other. I remember a man in my upstate town, an early Trump supporter,  telling me – his job went to Mexico years ago, he has been unable to find another: “look at this world. Some trans person wants to go to the bathroom and it’s front page news, I’m out of work for 20 years and nobody gives a shit.”

Vance argues that the hillbilly hatred of Obama has less to do with racism than class – he is just so different from them in so many ways – elegant, well-spoken, poised and confident. He seems almost hopeless about the hillbilly future.

“I don’t know what the answer is, precisely,” he says honestly in the book, “but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

I confess I was hoping for more in the way of solutions.

The picture Vance paints of his family and the hillbilly culture that spread from Appalachia to the factories and middle-class lifestyles of the Midwest is heartbreaking. These are the people variously called hillbillies, rednecks, white-trash. They have, in fact, been left behind. It is easy to understand their anger.

Poverty, he writes, was the family tradition. I’ve heard many people say this election is about the last stand of the angry white man, but I see that this group suffers from its own kind of cultural racism. Who has a good word to say about angry white men, and who is more stereotyped?

Vance’s family, like so many others, moved from Kentucky and the Appalachian states to what we now all the Rust Belt for the good factory jobs that brought them unprecedented prosperity and the middle-class life that had eluded them in the impoverished rural towns and valleys – hollows, Vance calls them – that they came from. Their ascent did not last long.

In the past quarter-century, their new communities began to deteriorate. The new global economy decimated town after town, left malls and downtowns vacant and houses unsaleable.

Nobody lifted a finger to help them through the great transition.

The steel and automobile factories shut down, moved away, laid hundreds of thousands of people off. Their downtowns deteriorated, so did property values, and the number of homes with two parents plummeted. The only things that went up were suicide rates, crime and drug addiction. While other cultures organized, protested, formed lobbies and generated media coverage, the hillbillies just fell deeper into poverty and crisis.

In late July, the American Conservative magazine ran an interview with J.D. Vance about his book that drew so much traffic it briefly crippled the magazine’s website. The book has been a best-seller ever since.

Vance’s description of his own family – the mix of tragedy, poverty, love, dislocation and violence – is harrowing. He credits his grandmother with saving his life,  the Marines with giving him a sense of hope and responsibility, and of sparking his rare journey out of the hillbilly culture into Yale and beyond.

Most of the people he grew up with and left behind are not so lucky.

Although Vance admirably spares us political cant and hectoring – people on either side of the political spectrum will be comfortable reading it, I sure was –  the book has a distinctively conservative message.

Vance is a contributor to the National Review and works in a Silicon Valley investment firm.

He has no solutions to offer. He says several times that he feels the problems of the white working underclass are beyond the ability of government to fix, and he suggests the white poor take more responsibility for themselves and their lives, as he did.

To me, this smacks a bit of blaming the victims, Vance was lucky and resourceful, not everyone is.

In a sense, this has always been one of the core differences between liberals and conservatives, this idea of how much government should and can alter the lives of people. Vance does not blame education or government for the problems of the white underclass, he suggests the white working class culture is at times parasitic and self-destructive, too much in love with cellphones and government handouts.

Vance told his story beautifully, and captured the almost schizophrenic atmosphere of love and loyalty,  and hate and self-destructiveness that shaped his world. He points out that poor whites are utterly contemptuous of media and politicians, they believe nothing either tells them, and they are increasingly open to conspiracy theories and raging ideological websites and talk shows that offer them “news,” fuel their alienation and promote a hatred for government.

He is clearly an advocate for personal responsibility.  People, he suggests, need to stop whining and pull themselves up.

I can’t say I came out of the book feeling hopeful about democracy at the moment, and I wonder if there isn’t a single thing government might do to help these people, to raise them up, they are the left behind. Are we expecting too much from government?

The hillbilly elegy is poignant, these are the ones left in the cold by trade agreements and the global economy, these are the ones national political leaders either didn’t know about or didn’t care about. Vance watched his once booming downtown fade away,  the stores and streets empty out, the good jobs flee, the neighborhoods deteriorate,  leaving his town in crime and poverty and hopelessness.

For the hillbillies, their middle-class life vanished, the system no longer had much to do with them, they have no stake in it, even though Vance describes them as being intensely patriotic.

I am much struck by Trump’s ability to speak so directly to this culture, and see how much they trust him. He can do no wrong, as if they see him as their last chance.

I’m not sure if this stems from shared rage and anger, or a genuine empathy from Trump for the people we have forgotten. Vance reminds us that the people he grew up with have watched for years as other people and identities seem to draw so much support and attention while they receive almost none. In a sense, Donald Trump was almost inevitable.

I found the book valuable and informative.  Vance writes simply and very well. I would recommend it highly.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of A Family And Culture In Crisis, Harper-Collins, $27.99