Since the end of the Great Recession, 95 percent of all income gains have gone to the wealthiest one percent of Americans. Though the economy is growing, the recovery has been the slowest since World War II, and the average income of 99 percent of Americans, once adjusted for inflation, has actually fallen from pre-recession levels. Thirty-three million Americans are still without health insurance, and premiums and deductibles have gone up for the rest. In 2009, Obama promised to cut the average family premium by $2,500. He broke that promise.

The middle class is collapsing. Good jobs are disappearing and real wages are going down. Americans know something isn’t working, and they’re angry.

During the campaign, Trump said — as Republicans have always said — this is Obama’s fault. Immigrants are stealing our jobs. The government is the problem. It wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter; that message was compelling. Clinton’s message, on the other hand, was basically, things are fine…anyone that doesn’t think so is “deplorable.”

That’s not an equation that could ever have balanced in Democrats’ favors.

In 1998, the political philosopher Richard Rorty penned an eerily prescient book called Achieving our Country. He wrote:

…Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The…electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers…and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

It’s a hard passage to read without thinking of Donald Trump. If you didn’t know better, you might think he was writing two days ago, not two decades.

I’m not quite as clairvoyant as Rorty. I first feared Trump might win this past June, when I saw a poll by PPP that included this tongue-in-cheek question: “If the choices for President were Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, and a Giant Meteor hitting the earth which would you choose?”

The results? Hillary Clinton, 43 percent. Donald Trump, 38. Giant Meteor, 13.

Hillary Clinton was in the lead, so why did that poll scare me? Because I knew, sooner or later, voters would realize that Trump was the giant meteor.

“Trump is a blunt instrument for us,” Steve Bannon told Vanity Fair last summer. “I don’t really know whether he gets it or not.”

The Breitbart co-founder turned White House chief strategist was speaking for the alt-right, but he could have been speaking for any Trump voter. Any American dissatisfied with the economic status quo could very likely find something to agree with in Trump’s campaign rhetoric, which ranged from left-populism (protecting social security) to far-right authoritarianism (banning Muslims). Like some malevolent Chauncey Gardiner (right down to his penchant for watching too much television), many voters saw what they wanted to in Trump. Others simply saw a cudgel they might wield against the economic and political elites they blamed for the “American carnage” they had experienced over the last few decades: disappearing jobs, damaged pride, and an opioid epidemic devastating many rural families.

And, yes, those same voters willfully ignored Trump’s racism, xenophobia, jingoism, and misogyny. They should not be given a pass for that. Many actively revel in a now-mainstreamed white identity politics that was once the sole purview of neo-Nazis or the Klan. But, many others reconciled themselves to Trump’s racism reluctantly, the same way many Democrats were reconciled to Hillary Clinton’s support for a racist crime bill, which included maligning an entire generation of black men as “Super-predators” who must be “brought to heel”; or her support of welfare reform, which devastated poor communities of color across the country; or the racial overtones of her 2008 campaign against then Sen. Barack Obama.

It’s far too easy to malign these voters without ever taking a hard look at ourselves. We must never be tempted to turn a blind eye on racism, but neither can we ignore the fact that liberals’ path back to power runs right through these folk’s neighborhoods.

Where we go from here, and how difficult our path is, depends on Democrats developing a credible, populist, and progressive economic message in the next two to four years. I wish I could say I was hopeful. I’m not. But, I am determined.