Donald  Trump was elected by tapping into a wellspring of anxieties,  prejudices, frustrations, and legitimate grievances to which mainstream media and government had little awareness and no compelling answers.

Many of you may have noticed that this is a global phenomenon; European democracies are struggling to rethink their purpose and missions in the hope of winning back public support in a time of great immigration and globalization.

The challenge for democratic governments and their people is to learn everything they can from the populist uprising that is threatening governments and is displacing some of them.

Even in this turbulent time, the elites that govern our country and academe and media have to choose between fending off a wave of xenophobia and extreme nationalism or finally taking seriously the legitimate grievances that have become entangled with these angry movements.

Even now, journalists and Democrats and liberals and progressives ask every day in so many ways: how could this happen?

How could a disturbed and unfit being like Donald Trump draw millions of supporters and get elected President of the most important democracy in the world?

No one in the elite world of politics and opinion saw it coming, and very few are willing to come to terms with what it means and why it has happened. If we don’t start learning from it, it is almost certain to happen again.

Even today, four years after Trump, our best journalists, and most powerful politicians and liberal-minded citizens have responded mostly by demeaning and demonizing these new and angry movements.

It’s almost as if people who call themselves liberal can show compassion and empathy only for certain kinds of people, leaving millions of abandoned people to fend for themselves. That is not really working out well for us.

The most common response progressives have to Trumpism is the belief that populist fury against elites is primarily a backlash against growing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.

In other words, bigotry.

The white male working-class voters who elected Donald Trump and are his key supporters are angry and threatened by the imminent prospect of becoming a minority within their own country.

This idea that diversity is our future and should be welcomed and encouraged is at the heart of the new ideology of the elite – America is changing, and can’t change fast enough; it’s time to move the white males back and off to the side.

Many people in America – gays, blacks, women – feel victimized, even brutalized, by centuries of white oppression and discrimination.

But the white men who love Trump feel that more than minorities and women, they are the true victims of discrimination. They seethe and feel oppressed by what they view as the demands and oppression of “politically correct” discourse.

This is the anger and resentment that Trump has identified as his base of power and support, the mission of his presidency, and has chosen to champion and protect.

It’s hard for me to spot the sincerity in Trump, but I can almost accept that he has become a true believer in this populist movement because he feels so ridiculed and aggrieved himself.

He clings to this grievance so stubbornly, and often to his own detriment that I have to wonder if he doesn’t actually believe it.

This belief in injured and threatened social status highlights the ugly features of populism – the nativism, misogyny, and racism repeatedly voiced by Trump and other white nationalist populists and organizations.

Trump’s supporters year to go back; they are fighting for the once stable economies, jobs, and communities of the past.

Their fury is hopeless and misdirected, no matter how successful it was in 2016 when the scope and intensity of this movement exploded during the Presidential election.

Ultimately, Trumpism is hopeless; he and his supporters are railing against inevitable and unalterable forces. European populists are beginning to grasp this.

The world is now connected in ways that cannot be undone without catastrophe or even undone at all.

Trump has surely tried. Jules Verne understood the futility of fighting the future.

Instead of legislating a massive investment in rural and midwestern and Appalachian health care and job training, Trump has promised his followers a return to the old order. We’ll make all those nasty women and immigrants disappear.

Their faith and hopes will be dashed once again once they see – and they will see – that he and people like him are their problem, not their solution.

Huge tax increases for the riches Americans will not get the disenchanted white workers factories back from Mexico or China.

And that is nothing for progressives to gloat over. It will only weaken our democracy further.

The pandemic reminded us that we can’t really function without the Chinese supply lines that make our medicines and almost everything else we buy.

In his new book The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good?, world-renowned philosopher and scholar Michael Sandel writes about the elites’ alarm at the urgent threat to Democratic norms posed by Trump and other populist autocrats.

These progressive elites fail to acknowledge their own role in promoting the resentment that led to the populist backlash. They don’t see that the upheavals we are witnessing are a political response to a political failure of “epic” proportions.

At the heart of progressivism is the idea of compassion and understanding for the needy and vulnerable and down-trodden. We are willing to see Blacks, gays, women, Native Americans as oppressed by our systems and government.

But we have nothing but contempt for the white working-class men who have become some of the country’s most oppressed and vulnerable people. The progressive and political response to Trumpism (this is me talking, not Sandel) is to dismiss Trumpism as being mostly about selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance.

Angry populists are not born; they are made. Our political system made them. And angry populists are not nice or pretty.

At the heart of this failure, writes Sandel, is the way mainstream political, government, and media entities conceived and enthusiastically executed globalism over the past forty or fifty years.

Two factors were primarily responsible for this, writes Mandel. One is a technocratic and corporate way of conceiving the public good; the other is a new and often destructive way of defining society’s winners and losers.

Our national faith is now in corporatism and markets, not individuals and communities.  Money is the measure of status and success. There is no joy or dignity in being poor and jobless in Appalachia or Pennsylvania.

Thus, we allow the family farm, once the heart of the American Experiment, to vanish because they can’t make as much money as the corporate farms. We reward companies for fleeing and we replace Main Street with gargantuan box stories.

At the same time, the market dehumanizes work and moves wealth and employment to cities, the home of our now hated elites.

Corporations and markets define the public good. This way of thinking drains public discourse of moral argument, says Mandel. Every question becomes a matter of economic efficiency and corporate profit, by nature the province of experts, not workers.

If the economy is “good,” it doesn’t matter of tens of millions of Americans are growing poor and more miserable.

Globalization, which was supposed to bring universal prosperity, instead brought growing inequality. Suddenly, goods and capital – and jobs – flowed freely across national borders, vaporizing communities, jobs, and individuality.

There are few Main Streets left open in rural America.

There was a new political divide; it was no longer left versus right but open versus closed. It became common to denigrate critics of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, and unrestricted capital flow as being close-minded, rather than open-minded, tribal, and ignorant rather than global and enlightened.

In other words smart rather than dumb.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration joined with Republicans – one of the last times Democrats and Republicans collaborated on a grand scale – in promoting global trade agreements and deregulating the financial industry.

The benefits of this will sound familiar in 2020; they all flowed mostly to the top.

Democrats, who professed to know better, did little or nothing to address the deepening inequality and the growing domination of corporate money into the political system.

“Having strayed from its traditional mission of taming capitalism and holding economic power to democratic account,” writes Sandel, “liberalism lost its capacity to inspire,” especially among the white working class, who saw their jobs vanish, their communities shattered,  their cultural identity ignored.

No wonder they started voting Republican.

They knew they were seen as violent, stupid buffoons by this wealthy and growing class of elites (think San Francisco and New York City and Boston).

People who protested this radical shift in culture and community were labeled as short-sighted, incestuous, and eventually, racist.

Hardly any effort was made to retrain displaced workers or rebuild their shattered Main Streets, or support their farms or culture.

The angrier they got, the more they were ignored, dismissed, and increasingly, treated with contempt. It was blacks and women and gays and other minorities that needed help and attention, not white men fighting for the past.

In addition to their outrage at seeing their work and communities destroyed, they were now seen as fools.

Everything the elites supported – abortion rights, gun control, climate control – they opposed. The more the elites hated Trump the more they loved him. Out of sight and mind, the momentous class war was brewing.

It exploded in 2016.

Climate change was presented to them by Republicans and corporate coal and energy companies as another hoax, a way for the elite and their scientists to take their livelihoods and work away (just like the pandemic).

Suddenly, there was a President who saw it their way. And who shaped his policies accordingly, every chance he could. He didn’t just rail against the elites, he stuck his finger in their eyes every day.

Corporate lobbyists and money almost equally corrupted the Democrats. There was no longer anyone on their side, or even anyone paying them much attention. Until Trump.

Trump sensed grievance and fury big enough to drive a Presidential campaign right through to the top. Trump grasped this culture’s grievance, but he makes a poor populist, being a greedy billionnaire with absolutely no connection to working people.

And he seems obsessed with grievance. It fit.

He made all kinds of promises but didn’t know enough about the real world or government to make them come true.

He could appoint Supreme Court Justices who also resented elitist ideas about justice, but he couldn’t reverse globalism or make China go away, or make Mexico pay for the wall or keep those big factories from closing.

His populist base loves him, but there are not enough of them to keep him in power.

The great fears of the white working-class are coming into being.

Women are revolting in force, suing harassers, becoming doctors and lawyers, running for congress. They threaten to dominate this election.

Blacks and other minorities are organizing in ways that are not possible for the embattled white working class.

The elites are richer than ever.

When the dust settles, Trump will be just another kind of elite that broke their hearts and dreams.

Also – this is where progressives have stumbled badly – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to be the only Democratic political figure willing to speak some truth about the inequalities in America.

And Democrats keep her out of sight for fear they will be branded as radical.

America has become a land of rising inequality.

The age of globalization has spread wealth unevenly, to put it mildly. In the United States, most of the nation’s income gains since the late 1970s has gone to the top 10 percent, while the bottom half received virtually none.

In real terms, the median income for working-age men, about $36,000, is less than it was four decades ago. Today, the richest 1 percent of Americans make more than the bottom half combined.

Why should anyone be surprised at a populist uprising that once would have been inspired and led by Democrats and liberal populists and artists like Woody Guthrie, but was instead led by Donald  Trump, who has never been known to touch a working-class white worker?

Trump says he fears their germs. This is like Louis the 14th getting a new wig and getting chosen to lead the French Revolution.

President Obama, who loved global trade agreements, was fond of quoting a pop song: “You can make it if you try.”

Obama, like so many Washington politicians, seemed aloof and contemptuous to the populists. He seemed to have no natural connection to them and he rarely visited them or talked to them.

The Democrat idea was telling workers whose jobs had disappeared due to globalization that those who would work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their talents would take them.

That was a lie, as big as any that Donald Trump has told. Instead of being humbled by their role in wrecking so many lives, liberals joined Republicans in blaming people for being desperate and poor.

And Democrats fed at the trough of big money and lobbyists just as enthusiastically as anyone else.

Obama’s rhetoric rang hollow in 2016, and it rings hollow now.

In today’s economy, it is harder and harder to rise. Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults. Of those born in the bottom fifth of the income scale, only about one in twenty will make it to the top fifth; most will not even rise to the middle.

As a culture, we used to take equality for granted.

This combination of greed and market morality made Donald Trump and his populist revolution inevitable.The

Working-class whites – Trump supporters – came to believe that Blacks and other minorities were their enemies, not their comrades.

America will truly change when these disparate groups come to see how much they have in common.

Perhaps this union, if it comes,  will wake up the people who call themselves liberal and progressives and challenge them to listen to populist rage and try to respond.

That would, it seems, be the best vaccine against another Trump.

There are some signs that Joseph Biden Jr. grasps the origins of this movement; he is actually talking openly about remedies for this hopelessness. And he is the first prominent national politician in a while to come from the white working class.

Nobody can call him an elitist.

I can’t speak for what anybody else has learned, but what I have learned is that there are plenty of Donald Trumps out there waiting to speak to the howls of pain and grievance that are turning our country upside down.

The people who love democracy ought to try to get there first.

I hope I will carry out the promise to myself to learn and try and listen.