This explanation might seem remarkably economics-centric. But that’s precisely the point. In the culture war that currently cleaves America, there are three sides. There are progressives who believe that racism, nativism, and misogyny powered Donald Trump’s rise and must be defeated. There are conservatives who believe that Trump’s election was a response to “political correctness”—the left’s effort to demonize as bigoted anyone who defends the traditions that made America great. And there’s a third group that thinks it’s all a dangerous distraction, a fight over where to place the chaise lounges on the Titanic. What’s killing America, this camp argues, is bad economics; treat that and the identity hatreds will fade. Over the past quarter century, two presidential candidates have mobilized these economics-first, culture-war-indifferent voters into a potent force. The first was Ross Perot. The second is Andrew Yang.

When Perot died this summer, many commentators described him as the precursor to Donald Trump. But while there are obvious similarities between these two egomaniacal protectionist businessmen, they differed in at least one crucial way. Trump—like George Wallace and Pat Buchanan before him—built his political career on racism. He launched his presidential campaign with a tirade against Mexican immigrants. In the 2018 midterms, Trump made the migrant “caravan” the centerpiece of his campaign strategy, even as allies begged him to talk about the strong economy.

In 1992, Perot did the opposite. He tried to avoid the culture war, which he saw as a distraction from America’s economic woes. Perot, The Washington Post’s obituary recalled, was “evasive on gun control.” While personally pro-choice, he said that when it came to abortion, “the people are ready and willing to put [past] divisions behind us.” In general, the Post noted, Perot “saw little role for a president on such [culture war] issues, saying they mostly should be left to the states.” He “understands the mounting public frustration at how the social issues, especially abortion, have tended to dominate the economic issues that many consider the federal government’s primary responsibility,” noted a 1993 essay in The New Republic.

Instead, Perot focused obsessively on economic mismanagement—a rubric that covered trade deals such as NAFTA and, above all, the national debt. While the Cold War had ended, he declared, “another war is upon us. In this new war, the enemy is not the red flag of Communism, but the red ink of our national debt.” The New York Times observed, “The difference between Mr. Perot's specificity on deficit reduction and his tentativeness in other areas reflects the importance he assigns to economic issues.” An adviser admitted that Perot “never really formulated positions on what he considered the secondary issues, which was basically everything other than the economy."