The sociological transformation of the Republican Party into a working-class party means that its base has more in common economically with the average black American than the country-club G.O.P. of yore. The secularization of American society means that the religious right and the churchgoing African-American community share a metaphysical worldview that’s faded elsewhere in our spiritual-but-less-religious nation. And the economic populism and foreign-policy anti-interventionism of Trumpism — well, at least campaign-season Trumpism — were closer to common African-American views than the typical Republican agenda.

So black America and conservatism have converged in interesting ways — but in the most important way they are inevitably divided, for the obvious reason that Donald Trump’s ascent began with a racist conspiracy theory and then added other white-identitarian appeals.

It is a liberal mistake to think that bigotry suffices to explain the Trump phenomenon. But it is a conservative error, naïve or culpably ignorant, to act disappointed that black Americans aren’t attracted to a coalition led by a barely-repentant “birther” who flirts with white supremacists.

For decades, the essential failure of conservative outreach to African-Americans has been the insistence that the right just want to treat black Americans as individuals — a fine-sounding idea, except that white America has never found a way to treat its former slaves that way, making black identity politics not an indulgence but a matter of survival.

To this failure Trump has added an exclamation point. He has been shrewder than libertarian conservatives in recognizing that individualism is not enough, that the right needs a politics of solidarity. But his appeals to solidarity have often been racially exclusive in exactly the ways an African-American skeptic of conservatism would have predicted.