Instead of serving as the political arm of working and middle class voters seeking to move up the ladder, the Democratic Party faces the prospect of becoming the party of the winners, in collaboration with many of those in the top 20 percent who are determined to protect and secure their economic and social status.

In an interview published by Vox.com on Aug. 8, Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, described the consequences of the emergence of “liberal cosmopolitans, really the upper and middle class of America,” who are

increasingly disconnected from working-class America. I mean that in a very specific sense. Our residences are increasingly segregated by class. Our schools are increasingly segregated by class. Our extended families are increasingly separated by class.

Writing in Politico magazine in May, Michael Lind, also a fellow at New America, argues that this cultural conflict created the political environment that made the Trump phenomenon possible in the first place:

Most culture-war conflicts involve sexuality, gender, or reproduction. Social issues spurred a partisan realignment by changing who considered themselves Democrats and Republicans. Over decades, socially conservative working-class whites migrated from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, especially in the South. Socially moderate Republicans, especially on the East Coast, shifted to the Democratic coalition.

The result, in Lind’s view, is an emerging Republican Party dominated by

working-class whites, based in the South and West and suburbs and exurbs everywhere. They will favor universal, contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort — programs like Social Security and Medicare. But they will tend to oppose means-tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and their families cannot enjoy.

This shift, Lind points out, will powerfully alter the Democratic coalition, too. The Democrats will become

even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with racism and fascism.

From this vantage point, Trump and the pro-social insurance populist right that has emerged in much of Europe are as much the result of the vacuum created by traditional liberal political parties as they are a function of the neglect of working class interests by conservatives.

You can look at the populist insurgency spearheaded by Donald Trump as either a corrective or a threat to mainstream Republican orthodoxy.

On the threat side, Trump has exploited a racist and authoritarian vein in American politics.

On the corrective side, Trump has tapped into and exploited the inadequacy of the responses coming from both major parties to voters who feel that they are “strangers in their own country.”

There are, however, major hurdles for anyone determined to capitalize on the Trump campaign in order to force an internal realignment of the Republican Party.

Trump has already demonstrated the ability to leap over one of those hurdles: the social conservatism of the Christian Right.

The thrice-married candidate – who over the course of more than 20 years and roughly two dozen appearances broadcast his sex life in interviews with the radio “shock jock” Howard Stern — retains overwhelming support from evangelical voters. A Pew survey a month ago found that 78 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump.