This is a perfect time to learn if one can put aside fear and hatred for a while, and tune out the politicians. It turns out that Donald Trump is a great teacher, even if he is a failed President.

In America, we tend to blame people when things go wrong, even the poor and the vulnerable. I’m reading a fascinating book by Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney called Alienated America, published in 2019.

I confess that I love this book because I have seen the truth of it firsthand and written about it frequently. I am living it now.

I live in the country and was shocked when I got here to learn that rural and heartland America has been hollowed out and is drowning in despair.

Rural communities have been in trouble for decades, although it’s gotten worse in recent years, but few journalists or Americans tied Trump’s election victory to it as closely as Carney.

No one in the mainstream media ever reported that before, as big a story as it is, and I can’t recall anyone even mentioning it until I moved here 15 years ago.

Our high tech media blew it in 2016, and they have also blown the state of much of the nation.

I have been writing about the death of community in rural America as often as I can. But I have to say, most of America has little patience for white people in trouble. Get in line,  take your turn is the message.

White men have hurt too many people to extract much sympathy, so they’ll take vengeance instead. Donald Trump was all about payback, not for power, but for pain.

Timothy Carney is a gifted conservative journalist writing for a conservative newspaper, but I think he put his finger at the heart of it. It’s all about the death of community in much of the country.

Donald Trump may be a failed President in many ways, but it turns out that he really is an important teacher. This is perhaps the last thing I expected of him.

Trump has forced many millions of people –  me and others –  to think about our lives and our country in a completely different way.

Maybe he should teach political science rather than replace Rush Limbaugh?

At this point, hating him is a complete waste of time, as is watching the Senate Judiciary hearings on Judge Barrett. There are more interesting things to think about. There is nothing to learn there that I don’t already know.

The most interesting parts of the Trump Era, it turns out, have little to do with him.

Donald Trump on the campaign trail reminds me of the sad night when an injured bear crawled into our pasture to die and had to be put out of his misery by an animal control officer.

Like Trump, his cries of pain and fear echoed in my mind for many months, and I still sometimes hear them even now. Trump is our wounded bear, crying out for help as he desperately rushes across the country.

Trump’s rallies are increasingly plaintive and pitiful. Rather than lift him, they diminish him, day by painful day. He just keeps getting smaller as his face make-up gets thicker.

He wants to be doomed. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” he begged at a Florida rally.

Even now, he doesn’t understand that it isn’t because he didn’t ask nicely, it’s because they dislike him intensely.

Even my angry regular MAGA e-mailers are getting more subdued and less confident.

Politically speaking, Trump is in his death throes.

In Florida, he also pleaded with his adoring MAGA army to spare him the humiliation of being beaten by Joe Biden, who he said was the worst presidential candidate in American history.

Please, he said, don’t let me lose to that.

The sad thing about Trump these days is that he is pleading with the wrong people. As much as his followers revere him, he can’t make more of them fast enough.

The virus has affected Trump, after all. He’s shifting from bluster to self-pity.

It is clear now that he knows he is losing and is terrified of being alone with failure. For the first time in his life, nobody is standing in line to bail him out or give him truckloads of money.

There is no point now for me or anybody else to hate Trump – there never was a useful time for that.

We are not about to make this mistake again any time soon. But we do need to understand why it happened in the first place.

Carney rejects the usual explanations for white working-class rage.

The problem, he says, is not federal neglect or drug overdoses or insufficient governmental assistance, new immigrants, or bad trade deals.

The white working class is suffering from the death of their communities, especially in rural America. The centrality of rural life in America has been declining for a long time, but understanding that the resulting loss of community helped elect Trump is a new and compelling idea.

I see this every day in my own life, and I was interested to see Carney put this in a book, part of the real intellectual history of the Trump Era. Up there, there is an almost ghostly sense of things missing.

History will show that we are all to blame; Trump was conjured up by broken spirits and ghosts of the past.

It’s becoming possible to understand what Trump is talking about when he says he wants to make America great again. For many of his followers, it was once great, and they want it to be great again.

Sad but true: the world doesn’t work in that way.

Carney’s theory – and my own witness – explains to some degree why religion, the rich ties and morals of the vanishing farm world, and our common values of decency and patriotism didn’t work to stop the ravages of Trumpism, which have nearly torn our democracy apart.

There are now few thriving or influential churches left – most have been sold – and there are few family farms now, no Granges or Masons or fairs or institutions to promote common values and meaningful, moral, and grounded lives.

“This is Christian country,” a minister from the next county told me, “we don’t lie and abuse people, but has anyone noticed that every church up here is closed or struggling to survive?”

Actually, no, hardly anyone from the other world has noticed.

Rural America has been hallowed out by government malfeasance and corporate greed. The spiritual and economic souls of thousands of communities are dead or dying.

Wal-Mart, not Main Street,  is now the heart of many rural cities and towns.

Everywhere you look, there is emptiness – fallow farms, epidemic drug abuse,  suicide, abandoned factories, shuttered Main Streets, rotting farmhouses.

One big question hovers over the meaning of the Trump era: Does the president appeal to white working-class voters because he promises to ease their economic pain, or is it because he strokes their prejudice?

So far, the smart people do their homework are concluding that class and race reinforce and enable one another, rather than conflict with each other.

Wendell Berry, the soul, and poet of rural America, has warned us about this loss of community for years.  He is not loud or nasty enough to get onto CNN or Fox News, but he knows what he is talking about.

“People use drugs, legal and illegal because their lives are intolerably painful or dull,” he wrote in a recent book. “They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional in healthy societies, where among us, it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we  have lost each other.”

Carney found much the same thing on his travels.

“Much of America has been left abandoned, without the web of human connections and institutions that make the good life possible,” Carney writes.

Living in the country, I’ve seen for myself the collapse of strong “middle” institutions, the communities that once existed between the government and the individual citizen.

This is most evident in the big and beautiful old churches that dot rural communities, many now empty or sold or tended to by part-time parsons and ministers.

“It’s hard to have faith without family,” writes Carney, “it’s hard to keep families strong without faith. It’s hard to keep families or faith strong without communities to support them.”

This is true. Faith is on the ropes in rural America.

Trump has offended almost every deep and enduring tenet of Christianity. Yet much of surviving rural Christianity is supporting him, not challenging him. Some even insist he was sent by God.

To me, this has always seemed indicative of the weakening moral values of fractured heartland America.

I have no doubt  Trump would have elicited a very different response even 50 years ago, long before the opioid epidemic, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture says has struck one in three farm families.

“Somebody didn’t spank him enough when he was a kid,” a Presbyterian minister told me last year.

Evoking Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam,  and using contemporary survey data, Carney found that regions of the country with weak family and community life were attracted to Trump’s message of nostalgia.

They want their America to be great again.

In contrast, regions with stronger social ties – strong athletic leagues, churches, charities, and social connections- were more likely to resist Trump and his grievance message.

Carney makes a distinction between the lives of individual voters and the condition of their communities.

“Trump’s core supporters weren’t necessarily poorer than other voters,” he found, “but they lived in places that were worse off, culturally and economically than other places.”

For generations, family farms and their solid values were the linchpins of rural communities – Wendell Berry writes eloquently about this.

Today, family farms are vanishing. There is no center left.

The dying churches and farms have left an enormous hole in the heart and soul of American rural life, and thus, in the rest of the country.

Carney’s America is often a place where the social, economic, and political consequences of a fraying civil society are laid out in wrenching detail.

Rural communities see declines in marriage, voting, church attendance, and volunteer work (volunteer fire companies can longer staff trucks and ambulances).

The educated and wealthy “elites” that Trump frequently rages about (while being a charter member) tend to live in urban areas where institutions are stronger and have enough money to insulate themselves.

For those seeking to understand what has happened to large swaths of our country, I would recommend a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eric Eyre,  Death In Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic.

Culture and media usually associate drug epidemics with impoverished urban areas, but the opioid epidemic tore through rural America like a superstorm.

Death in Mud Luck is the story of one pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia that distributed nearly nine million opioid pain pills in two years to a town with 382 people.

Eyre writes about the devastation in West Virginia caused by one pharmacy, unscrupulous, greedy doctors, and three utterly amoral callousness of the largest drug distributors in the country.

It’s a wonder they didn’t do more than get Trump elected.

Eyre’s story is one of shocking corporate greed, community disarray, and government indifference.

It is only now dawning on the victims of this epidemic that their hero had no intention of rushing to their aid or even helping them at all.

There are no tweets about that.

All over the heartland, hospitals and doctor’s offices are closing; there is simply no health care at all in many communities.

In his book, Carney focuses on areas of the country – rural areas – with rapidly growing income gaps and rising deaths due to alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide, particularly among non-college-educated white men.

“If you were studying Pennsylvania and Ohio in the 2016 election,” he writes in his book, “you could have predicted a county’s swing to Trump by looking at its rate of overdose deaths.”

He points to the prevalence of working-age men who seem to have “dropped out of the labor market, out of school, out of the family- out of life.”

This, he says, could be “the American carnage” Trump talked about in his inaugural address.”

Carney also found that racism is an undeniable aspect of Trump’s appeal to this audience,  his most fervently loyal supporters, especially in areas with high numbers of new immigrants.

The immigrants avoid unions and accept much lower wages than their white counterparts.

And they often share the same government services.

Diversity might be part of the new America, but it makes trust and social capital much more scarce in rural America.

Hating Trump has preoccupied and obsessed the liberal and progressive world ever since 2016.  Trump has worked hard to earn this enmity and anger.

Our understanding of what really happened here suggests we might have better things to do than hate one another.

White, non-college-educated white men are not held in especially high regard these days. They are considered ignorant, bigoted, and cut off from the country’s civic and social norms.

They are also bearing the lion’s share of the country’s anger and revulsion over Trump. It’s not their fault. Trump was necessary.

It took Professor Trump to call attention to the plight of these mostly rural and alienated Americans, even if he seems to have no idea how much they are suffering, or for how long.

Like Trump himself, the white working-class has learned from their master; they have learned to alienate everyone else, a poor, even tragic strategy for drawing the help and assistance they need of the country to become whole again.

Trump is like the novice beekeeper; he stirred up the hornet’s and is getting stung all over the place.

For me, it’s a test of our humanity and our own idea of community. Can we move away from hate and anger to help people in dire need?

I don’t see vengeance as healing America or making it great again. It will just bring us another Trump again.