Why is it that a person’s support for Donald Trump is easily predicted by the health of their civil society, with socioeconomic status and educational attainment?
By now, of course, we’ve answered these questions: deaths of despair, “American carnage,” Flight 93, and so on and so forth. The professional political class still refuses to acknowledge that Trump supporters and voters (the two are often different) are rational actors, because that would require them to acknowledge the depths of people’s desperation — culturally, economically, and often both.
It’s difficult to acknowledge the depths of this desperation when you live in a “superzip” — rich with social capital — and are primed by our system to see people with less money and less education as less rational.
