(On the eve of the much-hyped first debate, I am working on a series of pieces that explore how we got to this difficult place – why Trump was elected and what drives the people who support him. Just as I believe it is better to do good than argue about what is good, I also believe it is better to understand Trumpism than fret and rail about it.)

At the heart of Trumpism and the rise of Donald Trump is the deep belief among non-college-educated white working-class workers that they have been looked down on by the elites that have dominated America for the last forty or fifty years.

It seems there are some good reasons for them to think so. We think of our society as a meritocracy but that idea is under siege in the new global economy.

The definition of meritocracy is a system or organization of society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence based on their demonstrated abilities and merit.

For many years, merit in America was based on inherited privilege.

But merit in contemporary America has become something else, argues philosopher and author Michael Sandel, who eloquently describes what he calls “The Politics Of Humiliation” in his book “The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good.

I think Mandel has gone farther than anyone else I’ve read or heard in helping me to understand what has happened in our country to get us to this painful point. How did Donald Trump happen to us? Who do people love him so much?

We can’t fix something we don’t understand, we can only fear it.

In the new American meritocracy, Mandel argues, merit has increasingly become class-based. Parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards.

It is no accident that so few college graduates support Trump.

Slowly but clearly, modern America is divided in new ways: tech people and industrial workers, college-educated people and non-college-educated people, people who live in rural areas, people who live in cities.

Increasingly, that reflects the political divide of the country as well.

Those splits define the conflict that is tearing the country apart. They offer important clues to how it happened.

Donald Trump’s most ardent followers are non-college-educated white workers who have not been trained and educated in the new technical skills.

According to SEC filings, Google employees in San Francisco earn a median annual pay in 2018 of $246,804, an increase of nearly $50,000 from what Google employes made in 2017. Facebook employees earned a median income of $228, 521 in 2018.

Those with technocratic skills have created whole new and unprecedented classes of wealth and privilege, primarily in cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Austin, and Seattle.

Politicians rushed to embrace the new global trade agreements but never thought about the millions of workers they left behind or the staggering income inequity that might result. Nor did they consider the many thousands of towns hollowed out, the countless small businesses closed, and the empty farms abandoned.

They stirred a pot that has been boiling now for years.

Some countries – Canada for one – took steps to protect those displaced workers; their country is not nearly as divided as ours.

Trump supporters are rare in these newly affluent cities, Democrats and progressives have become rare in rural areas and places like Appalachia and Industrial Heartland.

Trumpism is about class as much as politics.

The problem with meritocracy, writes Mandel, is that the practice in its current form falls far short of its ideal. Morally, he writes that it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsized rewards that market-driven societies lavish on the “successful.”

Even progressives have long argued that success comes to the worthy, to those who are willing to work hard.

Thus, if one is wealthy and successful, those who are not wealthy and successful are somehow lazy, flawed, or inferior.

Another way to see this is this:  if you have the gifts a corporate, market-driven society happens to prize – specialized and expensive college education and technological or marketing skills – you can be wealthy and successful both.

These skills have become much more difficult to acquire for poor people in recent years as college costs have skyrocketed, their parents’ incomes have remained stagnant, and very few colleges in rural America teach them at all.

People at the bottom are making less and less money than ever; few can afford huge tuitions,  college loans, or count on gifts from wealthy parents.

The winners, suggests Mandel, acquire hubris, the losers, humiliation, and resentment.

To understand this, empathy is essential. You just have to see it from the way it looks from down there.

Are the poor struggling because they are stupid or inadequate in some way? Are the winners superior because they could acquire the skills necessary to meet meritocracy’s new market idea?

This new ethic is closer to reflecting the real truth –  that privileged elites can move into positions of success and power if they or their parents have the resources.

If they don’t, they most often can’t. For the past several decades, the American poor are not climbing up, their children are likely to be poor as well.

A degree from the right schools has become so important that wealthy parents have been bribing school officials and risked jail to get their sons and daughters admitted to the most prestigious and elite colleges.

The irony is that there are many excellent schools they could easily afford to send their children too.

The notion that our system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their own virtue – and to look down on those who are less fortunate than themselves, says Mandel.

It is difficult to be conscious of others, says Mandel,  when you think no one but you alone are responsible for your success.

There is no affirmative action plan for non-college-educated working-class whites, yet another reason they have become so resentful of Blacks.

A true meritocracy prohibits any sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to share a common purpose or fate. Merit,  says Mandel, has become a kind of tyranny and unjust rule.

Understanding the class war raging between Trumpism and Elitistm requires elites to acknowledge who they are and their role in shaping this very divided nation.

I have never considered myself an elite, yet I am in every sense of the word. I’ve lived in urban cities all my life, been a successful author, gotten some college education, and been praised for being special for having published 26 books.

My family was not wealthy, but I had access to the people I needed to move ahead. I got hired at the New York Times by simply walking in the door and taking the elevator in the newsroom and asking for a job.

I was on the way to the happy and prosperous land of the elites.

Elitism is generally defined as the elite’s existence as a dominating element in a system or society. Elitism is an attitude, a sense of having worked hard to succeed, of being special.

That is always the way I have seen myself – as someone who is solely responsible for his success. No one has ever given me a thing.

And yes, consciously or unconsciously, I was taught and believed that people who were not successful had somehow not worked as hard as me or possessed the gifts necessary to thrive.

I heard that all the time, almost every teacher I ever had told me that. If I worked hard, I will do well. If I don’t work hard, I won’t do well. It is natural to assume that people who fail didn’t work hard.

The barriers have mushroomed, it is not so easy anymore.

In an almost completely unknowing way, smugness is what snobbery and elitism are, and that is why so many Trump supporters hate elitists much more than a flawed and broken – and it seems, corrupt –  person like Donald  Trump.

In Trump’s world, the hubris of elites are infuriating.

No one likes to be looked down on.

Being told that your fate is entirely in your hands, “that you can make it if you try”  –  in hurtful. Politicians of both parties have been saying that for years, not realizing that it has become insulting as wages stagnate and costs rise.

For people who are not able to raise their incomes – most people – or who can’t find work or make ends meet, it is difficult to escape the dispiriting and degrading thought that their failure is their own doing, that they lack the talent or drive to succeed.

The Democratic Party was once the champion of farmers and working people against the abuses of the privileged.  Not now.

In 2018, Hilary Clinton told a conference in Mumbai, India, that “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” By contrast, she said Donald Trump drew his support from people who “didn’t like black people getting rights.”

So there it was, the party’s defeated candidate for the presidency was boasting that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country had voted for her. The bigots had not.

I grew up believing that the Democratic Party was all about fighting for the underdogs, the hard-working vulnerable people, the farmers, and the laborers.

The Democrats are continuously accusing Republicans of abandoning the poor, but if often seems the two parties are not as different as many would like to believe.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been demonized by both parties and hidden away during the campaign. She sounds much like the Democrats of the ’30s, her positions are considered too extreme today.

The politics of humiliation split the country in half, leaving 30 to 40 percent of Americans without a leader or a political party to represent them.

The educated elites have never been wealthier or more successful.

Donald Trump locked into the politics of humiliation right away and rode it to the Presidency.

It defines almost everything he does. It is somehow a part of his own story, a billionaire seething with resentment and desperate for affirmation.

His populism was strange; he proposed a health plan that would have cut health care for many of his supporters and pushed a tax bill that gave enormous tax breaks to the wealthy.

But he always emphasized that he did those things in the name of keeping America from being humiliated or pushed around.

When he withdrew the country from the Paris climate change accord, he said he did to protect American workers and jobs.

When he castigated NATO, he did so; he said because the Europeans were taking advantage of us and “humiliating us.”

When he threatened to trade with China, the reason, he said, was that China “had been taking advantage of us for years.”

If he loses the election, it will be because the Democrats screwed him and rigged the results. A big new grievance. Another reason to hate the elites.

Polls show that most Trump supporters have no idea he is losing and refuse to believe it is even possible.

Progressives – called “bedwetters” by the professional politicians – are certain that Trump could win.

That’s the problem with the Fox News bubble. If you trust it, you never really know what’s going on.

It is unlikely that running away from climate change agreements was about jobs or global warming, about which Trump seemed to know nothing.

This fed into the core ideology of Trumpism: we were being taken advantage of by elites, we needed to make our country great again.

Climate change was the creation of woolly-headed scientists looking for a reason to take their jobs away.

This idea of our country being humiliated mirrored his supporters’ isolation and humiliation, many of whom did and do care about climate change.

Patriotism was no longer defined as protecting our democracy; it is increasingly defined as tearing it down.

But supporting Trump was never really about the policies he adopted or abolished. It was about revenge, finally getting back at the elites who dismissed them as bigots, “deplorable,” and fools. It was about the politics of humiliation.

Like Trump himself, Trump’s followers defy the system by any means and at all costs, even when it harms their own best interests.

In recent years, elites have been technocratic and market-driven, and have not governed well.

The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful.

They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthening the welfare state and the social safety net, dismantled government-sponsored segregation, and presided over decades of economic growth that helped the rich and the poor.

Since then, wages have been stagnant for most workers,  we’ve been stuck in endless wars, weathered a great recession, and the country is experiencing unprecedented inequities of income. Plus, there is Donald Trump and the pandemic.

Today, says Mandel, the common good is understood only in economic terms.

It is no longer defined as promoting solidarity or deepening the meaning and bonds of citizenship. Towns and villages are wantonly decimated so corporate box stores can make more money and undercut local businesses.

If America has a common faith, it is satisfying consumer preferences as a measure by profit and loss and the gross domestic product. A corrupt system of campaign financing and gerrymandered congression districts has made a mockery of our democracy.

The Trump followers have challenged our system in a way progressives and liberals have failed to do. He didn’t just talk about dismantling a way of government; he set out to do it. In this way, he kept faith with his followers. He did what they wanted him to do.

And even if he has failed, he tried.

They have spoken loudly and clearly and sent a message saying our system is broken and needs to be taken apart and fixed. I’m not sure anybody wants to hear it.

The people who voted for Trump didn’t want a conventional President, they wanted a wrecking ball, and that’s what they got.

But they and Trump have both underestimated the elites’ depth and power, and Trump has been so obnoxious, corrupt, and offensive that he has ruined his own revolution and betrayed the people who elected him.

He has stirred up the country in an unimaginable way, and in the very opposite way, he intended. He is on a path to defeat.

The rich elites have a long history of winning political struggles.

I think that’s where we are, and to some degree, that’s how we got here. You can’t fix something you don’t know is broken.

Trump’s people have damaged our democracy, but so have the well-educated and prosperous elites who have grown snug, oblivious, and contemptuous of the great masses of people left behind.

I believe many have often looked down on these people.

A carpenter in my town asked me one day, “how much fucking money does a Silicon  Valley mogul really need to make?” I had no answer for him.

It seems everyone cannot succeed if only they will try. They might need some help.

Without some, they are much more likely to fail and struggle and become angry and dangerously disconnected from our ideas about democracy.