Trump is very clear about what will be stopped, but the vision of what will be done is perfunctory. In 1968, that vision was vivid and detailed—including a firmly stated commitment to work for equal justice between black and white America. Despite the greater trouble of those times, the message was optimistic. If it’s not fanciful to say so, it reads now like a speech for a country of young people—people whose confidence in their country had dimmed a little, but who were ready and eager to have their confidence rekindled. That’s not the country that Donald Trump sees, and he’s probably right not to see it.

The truest thought on offer at this Trump convention is the rubric for this fourth night: Make America One Again. It’s not one country now. It’s a country that feels itself starkly divided by class, outlook, and identity. In 2012, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan also saw a divided country. The country they spoke about was divided between makers and takers, between the 53 percent who contributed and the 47 percent who received.

Trump’s country is divided in a different way: between those who have lost a status they deserved—and those who have gained a status they do not deserve.

I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. I AM YOUR VOICE. I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws—or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash—I am not able to look the other way.

Donald Trump’s country is a country in which deserving people feel they have lost even the right to complain about what has happened to them, lest they give offense to some grievance group.

I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

And Donald Trump’s offer to them is less what he will do—about that he is exceedingly hazy—and much more what he will say: “I am your voice,” is the powerful phrase that he uses twice. So he is, and so it must be remembered as well by those shocked and angry at what that voice has to say. As he thus speaks, he will be heard—despite all that is false and manipulative and brutal in the speaker.

But unlike Richard Nixon, Donald Trump is not speaking for a silent majority. He is speaking for a despairing minority.

The range and reach of Trump’s voice will be inescapably limited by all the people he does not speak to. He does not speak to those rising and thriving in today’s America. He does not speak to entrepreneurs and business owners. He does not speak to people who work in creative industries or the sciences or technology. He does not speak to those who feel emancipated by the lifting of inherited cultural and physical limits. He does not speak to those who feel that this modern age, for all its troubles, is also a time of miraculous achievement and astonishing possibility.