One of the most popular ideas about Donald Trump this election cycle is that he has awakened a deep sense of "economic anxiety" from the white working class. This idea is often said to be supported by his poll numbers, and it’s true that white, non-college voters are backing him to a greater degree than other recent Republican candidates.

But though this theory is popular, I am not a fan of it for one pretty simple reason: I think pundits owe people the modicum of respect entailed by assuming that their behavior makes some kind of sense.

While plenty of people, including plenty of Trump fans, certainly have concerns about the economy, it’s racial resentment that drives who does and doesn’t support Trump. And without endorsing the resentful views of people upset about declining white privilege, you can see that supporting Trump is perfectly reasonable for people who think this way.

The social and cultural clout of nonwhite people really has grown in the United States, and demographic trends suggest that it is likely to continue growing in the near future. This is a real and important change, and whenever real and important change happens, you would expect some people to dislike the change. Trump has tapped into this resentment.

He gives every indication that he shares the concerns of people who are disturbed by fading white privilege, and has clearly demonstrated that he is willing to suffer a great deal of elite opprobrium to express those concerns. You may not share these concerns, but for the people who do, a Trump vote is a perfectly reasonable response.

Trump doesn’t dog-whistle. He is loud and clear about what he’s doing.

What’s more, Trump genuinely differs in this regard from recent Republican Party presidential nominees, as well as from figures such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and even, to an extent, Ted Cruz. The perception that the Republican Party "establishment" wanted to deemphasize white grievance politics is accurate. Trump departs from earlier GOP practice in precisely the opposite direction — dropping the notion of dog whistles that quietly signal sympathy with white grievance politics in favor of blatant racism.

The perception that electing Trump as president would decrease the cultural clout of "politically correct" norms and increase the social acceptance of mean-spirited behavior and hate speech is at least highly plausible.

All of which is to say that not only is white racial resentment clearly a statistical correlate of support for Donald Trump, it’s also a perfectly good reason to support Donald Trump.

By contrast, the idea that Donald Trump is going to usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity based on a revival of coal mining and labor-intensive methods of steel production is patently ridiculous. Under guise of being respectful of Trump voters’ concerns, pundits attributing his appeal to his economic "policies" are in effect attributing a remarkable degree of foolishness to his supporters. The more parsimonious and simple explanation is that there is a basic divide over values and cultural identity.

Adding economics doesn’t explain anything

At this point the wise and statesmanlike thing is to suggest that there is no need to posit a false choice between identity-based grievances and economic ones.

And it’s true, of course, that no single factor can explain all of American politics. But in this case, adding an economic anxiety factor to your account doesn’t actually help to explain anything. Trump’s supporters, for example, are considerably whiter and considerably older than the American population at large. If the economic problems of the past decade had been unusually hard on the white and the old, then an economics-focused explanation could be valuable. In reality, things have been rougher on nonwhites and rougher on younger cohorts.

By way of comparison, the racial and ethnic divide in the 2016 Democratic primary was stark, but it’s genuinely impossible to fully understand what was going on without incorporating an economic component. Sanders drew his support disproportionately from white voters, but Hillary Clinton did well among the oldest and most affluent cohorts of white Democrats. Clinton dominated the nonwhite vote, but Bernie Sanders did well with the youngest group of nonwhites — precisely the group that suffered the most during the recession.

There are good reasons to support economic policies that will help the white working class — even if you don’t share white resentment

This is not to deny that many Trump voters are legitimately disappointed by the economic performance of the United States in the 21st century. Income growth — particularly for people in the bottom 90 percent of the distribution — has been genuinely disappointing. It’s been disappointing for black and Latino Americans and for young ones, as well as for older white people. So to say that economic grievance doesn’t particularly explain anything about the 2016 election should not be taken as a denial that the grievances are real.

By the same token, the argument that economic grievances don’t fully explain Trumpism is not an argument that Trump supporters don’t deserve better economic policy.

All Americans — including the cranky racists and apolitical nonvoters and everything in between — deserve improving living standards. If Clinton becomes president and has the opportunity to enact her agenda of higher minimum wages, expanded Social Security benefits, expanded Medicaid eligibility, subsidized child care and college tuition, and $275 billion in new infrastructure spending, a huge share of the benefits will flow to economically struggling white people — and rightly so.

But when Trump voters say they’re upset about needing to press one for English, mad that Black Lives Matter protesters are slandering police officers, and worried that Muslim and/or Mexican immigrants are going to murder their children, it’s perverse to interpret them as secretly hankering for a refundable child care tax credit. If it’s a good idea, then by all means propose it and implement it.

But the argument about the nature of American identity that’s playing out around the country right now is real and important on its own terms, and it’s far and away the biggest driver of political behavior this cycle.

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The political science that predicted Trump's rise