The 21st-century world is a pyramid. Wiring everyone together did not so much empower everyone as connect the elites at the summit, the guys who had the view of everything and the means to turn what they saw into a geyser of cash. Busy with all that, sure of themselves, operating globally, benefiting from cheap labor and tax-lite impunity, they scarcely noted that they no longer had much connection with the masses below, whose view was still national, whose culture was still local, and who dimly suffered, with mounting anger, the transformative consequences of globalization.

Trump saw that he could be the vehicle of that anger. He grasped that nationalism, nativism and xenophobia were ripe for a rerun. Sovereignty is his mot du jour, even if — or more likely because — ever more of life is lived in a virtual reality where the nation is defunct. The ugly reactionary tide has not yet run its course. Trump will squeeze every last drop of political juice from it in 2018 and beyond. So will Europe’s rightist movements, still vigorous across the continent despite Emmanuel Macron’s uplifting victory in France. The neo-fascists of Poland, of Hungary, are on the march, their anti-Semitism not yet exhausted. In every Western democracy, Trump has helped unleash that which is most foul in human nature.

It’s the last stand of the white man, whose century this will not be. Demography is inexorable, as are movements in people’s minds. Wilson could still speak of colonialism as something to be adjusted, rather than the vile white exploitation of dark-skinned people that it was. Women, in his time, were mere adjuncts to men. The world moves on, but in zigzags, not straight lines. The front lines of race are no longer in British India. They are down the street, or over the tracks, within Western societies. Eurocentrism is over. Gender and sexuality are a battleground in the dismantlement of old ways of thinking. Yet the old, especially in male chauvinist form, never goes quietly. It digs in and it fights.

Of course, Trump’s reactionary politics do little or nothing for his white blue-collar constituency. What he offers is spectacle. This is the potent lifeblood of his movement: the appearance of action. Statesmanship is such a quaint word because spectacle has replaced it.

Trump’s proposed tax cuts are for the rich. Who else? Meanwhile, immigrants in New York and across the country are living in a terrifying dark age. Immigrant workers on farms are often too afraid to leave properties. Arrests of unauthorized immigrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency are up 43 percent over last year in the period between Trump’s inauguration and early September. All over the United States, mothers and fathers are being ripped from their children. Young immigrants who thought they could dream of an American future have seen that future denied.

The Trump administration has embarked on an all-out attack on the poor, be they recipients of food stamps, or Medicaid, or any federal cushioning of low-income existence and misery. Incompetence has been deified in his Washington. It’s not just the State Department that’s been eviscerated. The Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are not far behind. “Climate change” is now an unutterable phrase in official circles. Beneath all that Trump noise, ugliness and brutality spread in a fractured America governed by a man who thrives on division.