Max Boot wants us to know he regrets his support for the Iraq war, that the Republican party has disappointed him, and that his initial interaction with members of the white working class occurred in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his wife studied law at Harvard.

They were, Boot recalls, “Italians, Irish, Poles, Portuguese, etc. This was my introduction to the white ethnic, working-class politics that Donald Trump would exploit so skillfully across the rust belt.”

No condescension there.

In short, Boot is not a happy camper, alienated from the world that once ostensibly appreciated him, a world he thought he knew and understood. Not well enough, apparently.

An ex-Wall Street Journal opinion editor now at the Council on Foreign Relations, Boot expresses disdain of Trump and intense disapproval for his presidency. To be sure, he is dead-on in his criticisms of Trump’s tropism toward authoritarianism, his embrace of corruption, his disdain for institutions, and his reliance on thinly veiled antisemitism to rally the fringes if not the base.

Indeed, Trump’s mockery of the mail bombs dispatched to top Democrats and refusal to postpone a campaign rally the night after the Squirrel Hill massacre are ample and vivid reminders that Boot gets plenty right.

Still, what is jarring is how cosseted Boot was from the realities of the modern Republican party, even after having worked on the presidential campaigns of John McCain (2008), Mitt Romney (2012) and Marco Rubio (2016). Assuming Boot never came in direct contact with a real live campaign field operation, the enthusiastic embrace of Sarah Palin by the faithful and the disgust she evoked in the rest of us should have clued him in. Apparently not.

Boot also missed the fact that the Republicans voting core of is white, working-class and evangelical, though not necessarily devout. Think evangelical or fundamentalist in cultural terms, in an “I love Jesus and Nascar” kind of way, more than “hell or high water, I am at church every Sunday, together with my wife and kids”.

In other words, east coast donors and resident intellectuals are in the GOP primarily as sugar daddies and tinsel. The heavy lifting of showing up at the polls and nailing down the electoral college is the work of others, far from Manhattan and its environs.

The last time graduate degree America went Republican was 30 years ago, and the last time a majority of white voters threw their lot in with the Democrats was in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide over Barry Goldwater. Yet Boot seems to have grasped the significance of these factoids only when it was too late to matter.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war and the great recession, the disconnect between the white working class and its coastal and cognitive elites morphed into a chasm. Although Trump lit the fuse, the powder that exploded in 2016 was lying all around. Cultural and racial resentments played major roles but so too did the asymmetry of the economic recovery and the casualty counts of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yes, Barack Obama successfully steered the country back from the financial brink. Yes, Obamacare has finally won approval from nearly three-in-five Americans. But back then it was regarded as welfare, a sop to the lower economic rungs of the Democratic base, a jarring change to the status quo.

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan” came to be viewed as a huckster’s pitch that caused the Democrats to lose both houses of Congress. And as the US exited the recession, not everyone shared equally in the bounty.

On election day 2016, 700,000 fewer white Americans were employed than when the downturn kicked in. In contrast, Wall Street could smile and, as the New York Times reported: “Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost.”

As a result, the traditional disparity in support for the GOP between southern whites without college degrees and their rust belt cousins narrowed. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s reflexive worship at the twin altars of identity politics and political correctness helped forge unanticipated bonds of class and racial solidarity. Pro-tip: nobody likes being branded irredeemably deplorable.

Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Trump voters was not a wise move. Photograph: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images

From the look of things, Boot has not fully internalized the tectonics of the 2016 earthquake. His agenda for 2020 offers little that could be described as palatable to those who voted for Obama’s “hope and change” and then proudly paraded to the polls in red Maga hats.

Boot throatily backs immigration and says little about its costs, either political or economic. Deriding the president as a demagogue does not detract from concerns shared by tens of millions of Americans. Indeed, David Frum, the author of George W Bush’s Axis of Evil speech and another never-Trumper, has consistently drawn a direct line between immigration, wage suppression and Trump’s ascendance, a connection Boot skirts.

Similarly, Boot’s call for a “younger, more charismatic Michael Bloomberg” as the “ideal” presidential candidate misses the mark. Bloomberg strafed Trump at the Democrats’ last convention, only to fail in moving the needle. Bluntly, it is hard to see how a buttoned-down, socially liberal billionaire establishmentarian can earn the confidence of Reagan Democrats. In a sea of hypercharged partisanship, authenticity will probably be in demand.

The realignment Boot hopes for may be on the cards, as college graduates appear ready to abandon Trump in the midterms. But whether that happens and what impact it has on reshaping the balance of power remains to be seen. And, regardless, upstairs-downstairs coalitions are inherently unstable. In the end, Boot leaves a key question unanswered: who will speak for the middle class?