The world does not need white people to civilize others. The real White People’s Burden is to civilize ourselves.” – Robert Jensen.

There is much talk, as there should be, about the pandemic and our troubled racial history. There is little focus on the social group that has done more than any other to put Donald Trump in the White House, and that could keep him there.

Trump is the national poster boy for working-class white men. Trumpism has always seemed to me the last stand of the increasingly displaced and shunted aside white man.

This idea has become a reality in recent weeks, our presidential campaign seems to be shrinking right before our eyes.

It is no longer a conversation between a President and the people, rather a contest between the President and some people: the white working class, a/k/a, the group of Americans known as “non-college-educated whites.”

The white working middle class is in distress. They are increasingly isolated from the rest of American voters.

They mistrust government, fear immigrants, dread socialism,  resent women and people of color, and have been ostracized and expelled from the mainstream of American life.

In many ways, this election is their last stand. In a few years, they will be in the minority and remain there for the rest of all of our lives.

If large numbers of white men resent elitists and the melting pot, the favor is returned. White working-class men are pilloried in cultural stereotypes and media coverage and blamed for the havoc Trumpism is wreaking on America.

They are a mystery, these people. How, progressives and Democrats ask plaintively, could they support a President like this so blindly?

And yes, they are widely and falsely seen mostly as bigots and ignoramuses.

One woman accused me of being a racist for even mentioning the troubles white working-class men have been having when African-Americans are suffering so much.

But it’s important to talk about this. This is the elephant in the room when it comes to grasping the hair-raising politics of America right now and why our country is so divided.

(Make sure to note “working class” white men, not all white men are suffering: Fortune Magazine reports that college-educated white men still account for 72 percent of corporate leadership, 7 in 10 Senior Executives in corporations are white men.)

By the year 2050, the U.S. will be a majority-minority population with white non-Hispanics making up less than half of the total population.

The United States has an estimated population of  329,227,746 people. White men are being asked to move over in almost every aspect of American life.

White men are 31 percent of theU.S. population but hold 65 percent of all elected offices.

The Democratic Party has long championed global trade agreements, which devastated manufacturing and jobs in much of America, hitting white industrial and manufacturing workers harder than any other group.

As a result, working whites abandoned the Democratic Party all over the country, and then supported Donald Trump.

As the cities grew bigger and richer, and more and more people flocked to them, working-class white communities were devastated, there are no good jobs there anymore, Main Streets have closed down, the family farms are dying, the mills and factories in China,  Bangladesh or Mexico.

And look at what happened to white working-class men:

Today, fewer than seven out of ten working-class white men work in full-time jobs; in the 1950s, nine out of ten men worked in full-time employment.

Today, just half of the white men are husbands; in 1960, three-fourths of white men were married.

Today, 43 percent of 18-34-year old working-class white men live with their parents (compared to 36 percent of Millenial women); in 1960, about 28 percent did.

There are 36 percent more women in college today than men; in 1970, there were about 35 percent more men than women in college.

In 2013, mortality rates among less educated, middle-aged white men and women were about 20 percent higher than they were in 1998.

Working-class white men are 50 percent less likely to trust the government than women.

In recent years, there has been a roughly 20 point gender voting gap with white men being much more likely not only to vote for Republicans but to express disillusionment and anger toward government; until about 1980, men and women voted roughly evenly for Democrats and Republicans.

Membership in civic groups – including primarily male service organizations like the Masons, Rotary, Elks, and Kiwanis – have fallen between one third and two thirds since the 1960s.

White men in rural America, where most working-class whites live,  now have shorter life-spans than any other group in America except for Native-Americans.

They make less money than any other group on average, commit suicide more frequently, and die more often from drug overdoses than any other social group in the United States.

Researchers have found that tens of millions of white men have been pushed out of the mainstream of American life, a  reality with staggering consequences for our economy, family life, and politics.

These men don’t fit the stereotypes or images of poverty or of being disenfranchised. But Donald Trump knows they are there; they are the only Americans he speaks to most of the time.

These people are the perfect storm for Trump. Almost half of America’s wealth is in the hands of one percent of its people and is gathered around the coasts and most urban areas.

Since the 1970s, inflation-adjusted incomes for the bottom 80 percent of men have fallen steadily, with the most dramatic declines occurring among the bottom 40 percent, most of whom have less than a college education.

Working-class white men and Trump have bonded in an almost psychic way. Loyalty is everything; even the most egregious wrongdoings are excused. They only speak to each other, as if the rest of us were not alive.

Once unions were the glue that held working-class whites together, they were their safety net and gateway to the middle-class life.

But as jobs fled and unions were battered by new corporate-sponsored laws restricting their power, unions came to be seen by many of their workers as corrupt and useless, just like the government.

Immigrants flooded the industrial and construction job market, lowering wages for traditionally white working-class jobs and weakening unions, which they were often reluctant to join.

White men have never had a movement like the women’s movent to support them and their needs. Without unions, they have nothing and no one to represent them.

In 2016, Trump was about it, and in many ways, he still is.

These supporters share the same feelings and resentments about the world that he does; they get each other in ways the rest of us just don’t.

The story of working-class white men and his shocking rise to power is the story of Donald Trump and his rise to power.

If Black Lives Matter means so much to black Americans and progressives, Trumpism is the flagship social movement of disaffected and displaced and struggling white men, young and old.

For me, the irony is that these two movements have much more in common than either one of them seems to want to recognize; they would make a powerhouse movement if they ever got together.

Billionaires and corporations and  Republican strategists are spending a lot of money to make sure they stay divided.

You could fill vast online archives with writing about America’s long-overdue effort to come to terms with its bloody racial history.

But if you are thinking about our presidential election, which will determine the future of our country for years to come, you will read, see or hear almost nothing the group at the very center of our political storm and the people most responsible for it: working-class white men.

Like so many other social groups in America, they have been left behind.

Media organizations have finally begun to hire gifted, educated, and experience African-American journalists; they are transforming our understanding of race and back America.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a working-class white commentator on cable television or writing in the Washington Post or New York Times. When I worked in journalism, most reporters came from the working-class (like me).

Now, reporters mostly come from elite schools and universities, not from community colleges or trade schools or just in off the streets. There is no way for a white working-class kid to get near those jobs.

That means, their story is almost never told.

White working-class people are simply not represented in mainstream media or most coverage of our politics, just as African-Americans and women were excluded from media.

It takes too much money to run for office in America. Ordinary people rarely have that much.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is clearly not a white male,  is one of a handful of working-class people who have recently made it to Congress, and she has treated much like Lenin would be if he ran for office in American and won.

I think the system will never get over her or her “squad.” But she has a working-class sensibility – she was tending bar before running for office.

Her working-class values have stunned Washington, whose entrenched barons see her as the end of life as we know it. Very few working-class people can break through the way she did.

When modern media cover working-class people at all, it’s usually a reporter flying to Iowa from Washington or New York asking somebody with a hard hat if they still love Trump and why.

Frederick Douglass said in a fiery speech a long time ago that the white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

He might have added or by the oppression of women or hatred of immigrants either.

These groups are revolting now against what they see as abuses of white power.

And lots of whites feel aggrieved and oppressed in return. Nobody apart from Trump has nice things to say about them now.

According to the news,  working-class white men all over America are coming up to Asians since the coronavirus and telling them to “go home.” Many of these men are refusing to wear masks, or socially isolate; some show up to demonstrations and statehouses with machine guns to protest the shutting down of communities.

According to hate group monitors, these mostly verbal but sometimes physical assaults are up to three to four hundred percent since Donald Trump took office.

Since the pandemic, economic troubles have spread for many different groups, including the fortunes of African-American and Latino men, whose wages have fallen drastically.

There’s no evidence I’ve seen to show that Trump has done a thing to improve the lives or prospects of working-class whites, other than enabling their rage. But he is still their guy, he talks to them in every other tweet.

Social workers and economists agree that what will help these men the most would be addressing their problems with specific solutions – good and full-time jobs, higher wages, financial aid for education and re-education, available and affordable health care, programs to encourage and support responsible fatherhood and significantly increased civic involvement.

For this social group, the economy is perhaps the most critical issue of concern. Ida Wells wrote once that “the appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.”

In our elections, this seems to be true.

This, of course, is why the President is so desperate to get kids and adults back to school and work so he can get his booming economy back.

African-Americans have suffered much more intensely and holistically in more ways than white men. Still, they have been, until recently, far less angry and politically-engaged than white men. They don’t trust our government either.

Still, they are often seen by working-class whites as getting more attention and support than they are. Psychologists call this “scapegoating,” they often talk about the “scapegoating” effect of politics.

Just as sensitive children in dysfunctional families are often “scapegoated” by siblings and parents for the families troubles, displaced white American men have found scapegoats of their own: women, immigrants, government, African-Americans, Latinos.

Extremists, white nationalists, and demagogues have found angry white men to be fertile ground.

We often generalize when talking about cultural groups.

Just as all African-Americans are not poor, all-white American men are not angry. There are no magic formulas that cover everybody. Still, this alienation of the white working-class has had a profound effect on or politics and civic life.

As Trump has struggled to cope with the pandemic and racial protests, he has increasingly focused on issues that matter the most to his overwhelming white working-class base. The statue struggles are a timely example.

Americans support removing Confederate statues or using them as educational tools. Trump is vehemently opposed to removing them or changing them.

In doing this, he is speaking directly to angry white men when he claims that their culture is being disrespected and destroyed and that angry “mobs” of radical leftists and black protestors are tearing the country apart.

When Seattle cleared out the protestors occupying a precinct house and six blocks of downtown stores, Trump bragged to Sean Hannity that the city did so only after he threatened to send troops into clear them himself.

The mayor said Trump never called or spoke to anyone in the city, but Trump’s followers – they follow him on Twitter, on conservative websites, and Fox News, don’t know that. That’s why it’s so safe for him to lie.

His angry followers are meant to see him as the sole champion sticking up for their culture and blocking mobs of black and yellow and brown people and leftists out to make their lives worse and tear their communities apart.

The President is counting on this disenchanted group of Americans to vote for him in greater numbers than his critics and opponents. The math says he will lose this way, but he has other ideas.

My own perspective, for what it’s worth, is this: This election is one of the last opportunities white nationalists of any stripe will have to try to stop white people from becoming a minority color in less than a generation, if not sooner.

This is an inevitable change in the American story, even if efforts to slow or halt immigration continue. White men will have to move over.

Hopefully, a new government will be kinder and more compassionate than the present one, and the white men who are so frustrated and angry now will get the help and support they deserve.

They have a lot to complain about.

They feel victimized by a system that they feel has abandoned them, economically, and politically. Their communities have been hollowed out, all over the country as a result of trade agreements and the loss of jobs.

As I delve into the underlying forces that shape this election, I keep coming back to an unlikely source of wisdom about the growing anger and suffering of white men: James Baldin, who understood oppression well,  writing in his landmark book The Fire Next Time, wrote this for black Americans to read:

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”

: Photo and banner by Maria Wulf