Some thoughts about this: Trump's base = +/-23% registered voters. In the last election, only 136.8 million Americans voted. So we're talking about 30 million Americans, in a country of 330 million. https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1297184349897490432

Everything sociological is complex, and it's never going to be satisfactory to offer a monocausal explanation of the behavior of 30 million people, each of whom will be, in their own human way, infinitely complex. But @RadioFreeTom is absolutely right that mainstream observers,

(and most of the mainstream media and academia lean left, sometimes hard left; in this respect, the criticism from Trump's base criticism is correct), tend to be shaped by the influence of economic determinism.

So, in trying to understand the Trump phenomenon,

many in the media and academia have emphasized the economic roots of Trumpism.

Some emphasis on these roots is warranted; it does have economic roots. But the mistake is mirror-imaging: These aren't the only roots.

Many Americans have moved left--even hard left--because income inequality has grown. So they're inclined to view Trumpism as some kind of mutant, misbegotten effort to do the same thing. They miss the point @RadioFreeTom makes--there's a sociological key to Trumpism, too.

Man is a political animal--in many different ways. Along with wealth, people crave status and face.

Many in Trump's base feel *loss of status* as acutely as those on the left feel *loss of economic opportunity.*

Nor is this just about the country's diminished whiteness or its diminished enthusiasm for whiteness, either. That focus, too, is to some extent a projection by those who are very aware of race.

It is also, and perhaps more, as Tom said, about *urban* culture and values--

which have come to dominate both the nation and the world. "Urban" denotes a range of issues and viewpoints, but it can be illustrated by the divide between people who think "WAP" is funny, catchy, ironic and not-so-shocking

--and people who think it's flat-out porn, and cannot believe they're being told to "celebrate" WAP as the apex of female empowerment.

The latter point of view, and many other points of view related to it, would once have enjoyed a great deal of status in America.

Had you said, "That video is disgusting. Don't let the kids see it," yes, some people would have laughed at you as out-of-touch and repressed, but basically, the mainstream would have either been with you--

or dealt with your view as a reasonable one.

Now, if you say that, within hours you'll become a Ben Shapiro/Cardi B./Megan-Three-Stallions mixtape, and the entire world, including me, will laugh at you.

So there's loss of status--

and that is an especially humiliating loss, because they see the urban mainstream as *in no position* to be looking down on them: It is, after all, is busily insisting that WAP is the apex of female empowerment.

Thus humiliation.

The humiliation is about having lost the battle to control the culture. It's about being mocked, incessantly, by people who think WAP is high art--mocked, in other words, by shrewd, avaricious sluts who've managed to get the NYT to discuss their pornographic oeuvre

in language previously reserved for Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions.

The humiliation was like the ammonium nitrate stored in Beirut's port--there for years, unnoticed, dangerous and ignored. Trump figured out how set fire to it, in just the right way.

It exploded and took down a whole country.

Mainstream Americans, generally speaking, don't understand this what was once a leftist worldview has become culturally mainstream: "everything is, somehow, about the economy or race."

So mainstream America is repeatedly surprised to discover that Trump's base is not economically rational. No, it's not economically rational, because it's not rational at all--it's suicidal and homicidal, as those who have been humiliated often are.

It has lost. And the rest of America often fails to grasp that systems of thought we could call "the left" (or now, "mainstream") are representative of both the (urban) overclass *and* the (urban) underclass--

so "the left" has no idea how patronizing and imperious it sounds--as of course it would, because it has long since won.

Trump's base knows it has lost this war. Many of them believe, to a greater or lesser degree, that this means *everything* is lost,

so they're engaged in rearguard guerilla/harassment action against the US itself--which they now see as an occupying enemy, of sorts.

I doubt very many think they can actually win this way. I suspect most know, if only unconsciously, that they can only hope to exact revenge--

by "owning the libs," i.e., inflicting humiliation in return, and by destroying the country. But that's what they're prepared to do. The fuel behind it is vengeance, *ressentiment*

"If we can't have this country--if these libtards think they can run this place, on their terms--then no one will."

"We will *force* them to take us seriously, even if it means we all die."

This, I think, is why they're so eerily unmoved that Trump committed treason.

They see it as a war. In a war, you do what you need to do. You accept help from any quarter. All's fair in love and war. If you need to make friends with Stalin, you make friends with Stalin. If you need to make friends with Putin, likewise.

So--I think @RadioFreeTom is right: the base feels humiliated; jumiliation is a massively under-appreciated driver of human behavior, and it is powerfully pathogenic; see e.g. this discussion: http://jaapl.org/content/38/2/195

Transformations in culture and law that genuinely seemed, to urban Americans, natural and reasonable extensions of the American promise, were experienced by rural Americans as profound, deliberate humiliations: e.g.--

"We're going to be forced to bake cakes for gay weddings?"

"The Little Sisters of the Poor are going to have to pay for contraceptives?"

Urban Americans who immediately understand why it's wrong to force Muslim ICE detainees to eat pork, who instinctively see that this is a de facto “degradation ceremony"--

failed to grasp the effect it would have on rural American Christians to force them, under color of law, to do something equivalent.

This is not an apology for Trump's base. It's an explanation.