This is the most revealing sentence: "Trump treated the debate like he was trying to win an argument between two baby mamas on a trash daytime show."

Part of the problem is that every American understands that sentence. And they shouldn't. https://twitter.com/Timodc/status/1311156594269323264

Americans collectively decided, at some point, that it was fine to have "trash daytime shows" featuring "two baby mamas." It primed us for Trump.

Behavior that should have been stigmatized (and situations that were inherently tragic) instead became entertainment.

Well-off people understood perfectly that the screaming women on those shows were objects of derision and mockery.

But the women in question did not.

The normalization of single motherhood and family dysfunction was catastrophic for the poor--and it pushed a good chunk of the middle class into poverty, too.

"Changes in family structure" (as the prim, well-off, educated class calls it) among the uneducated fueled the rise of childhood poverty and dysfunction, which became adult poverty and dysfunction.

This effect has been documented over and over again.

Since the 1970s, everything--culture, the economy, policy--has been militating against stable, working-class family formation.

1) Uneducated men have seen a decline in real wages. They've experienced longer periods of unemployment. Women don't want to marry men without jobs.

2) We made marriage less appealing by offering better welfare benefits to single women than to families.

3) The sexual revolution eroded the norm that marriage was a permanent arrangement and childbirth out of wedlock was unthinkable.

4) The people who thought it would be hugely entertaining to see baby-mamas duking it out on trash TV also drowned the public in romantic love stories, arguably even more destructive--

--the ideal of romantic love raised expectations for marriage to the absurd and the unachievable.

5) We put men in prison at historically unprecedented rates.

Everything worked against the formation of permanent marriages, which are essential to stable societies.

(As you've noticed, ours is no longer stable).

Not only is the institution critical for creating and transmitting wealth, it's absolutely essential for children to have stable attachments to both parents.

Upper-class Americans, despite their rhetoric, behaved as if they understood this.

But lower-income Americans didn't, and the consequences were catastrophic.

Single motherhood and divorce are events that range from "bad, but manageable" to "catastrophic, financially and emotionally," for kids.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Full-Report.pdf

5) The Left reliably mocked anyone on the Right who said, "Traditional, two-parent families are important" as a sex-hating, homophobic hypocrite.

6) The Right has reliably been comprised of sex-hating, homophobic hypocrites.

The Right spent years inveighing against homosexual marriage--as if *that* was the problem.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was heterosexual marriage.

Specifically: heterosexuals failed to get married and stay married.

Kids who grow up without both biological parents in the home are overwhelmingly less likely to thrive. Stepfathers kill their kids more than 100 times more often than biological fathers do: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0162309594900140?via%3Dihub.

Preschoolers living with a step-parent are 40 times more likely to be abused: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0162309585900123

Children living with a single mother or a step-parent are at much higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological parents.

No matter your race, if you're a child of a single mother, you are four times more likely to grow up in poverty.

So the children of "baby mamas" are vastly more likely to be poor, beaten, abused, addicted, and uneducated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6313686/https://www.jstor.org/stable/353132

On the Right and the Left alike, the real divide was class: Upper-class and upper middle-class Americans stayed in school, got married, and stayed married, and enjoyed the economic and emotional stability that obtained.

Everyone else fell deeper and deeper into the mud as their families grew more unstable. And rather than stigmatizing family dysfunction openly, we stigmatized it covertly--by putting it on television, for everyone's entertainment.

Educated Americans were in on the joke and knew these women were not role models.

Uneducated Americans were not in on the joke.

We created a culture in which Trump seems, to uneducated Americans, perfectly normal.