The increase in workplace robots was not alone in driving voters to the right. Communities where industries lost ground to imports from China followed a similar pattern.

In a September 2017 paper, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” David Autor, who is also an economist at M.I.T., and three of his colleagues, dug further into the demographics of those suffering the economic costs of trade with China.

Autor and his co-authors found that

Trade exposure catalyzed strong movements towards conservative Republicans between 2002 and 2010 in counties with majority non-Hispanic white populations.

The gains made by hard-right Republicans came at the expense of moderate Republican and Democratic incumbents.

Even more significant, Autor determined that though generally speaking trade shocks did not “favor conservative politicians,” shocks “that disproportionately affect white males” did.

The authors provide more detail, explaining that the

rightward shift is driven by trade shocks to industries that have traditionally employed white men in relatively large numbers, and is largely unrelated to shocks to other industries.

Autor and his co-authors cite research showing that

voters choose to supply fewer public goods when a significant fraction of tax revenues collected from one ethnic group is used to provide public goods shared with other ethnic groups

and that

voters in an in-group object to their tax contributions being used to support individuals in out-groups.

That translates to: white voters, especially white men, oppose paying taxes for programs that primarily provide services to others. In practice, the authors suggest, trade shocks

catalyze anti-redistributionist sentiment (seen in the election of conservative Republicans) in majority white non-Hispanic locations where taxpayers may perceive themselves as transfer-payment donors.

This white male effect was critical to the link connecting, as Autor and his co-authors write,

economic adversity to in-group/out-group identification, as motivated by group-based resource competition or opportunistic use of political extremism.

Their analysis resonates, they suggest,

with the themes of recent literature on the political economy of right-wing populism, in which economic shocks to dominant population groups engender a political response that sharpens group identities and enhances support for conservative politicians. This pattern is evident in our finding that the impact of trade shocks on political polarization appears largely attributable to increases in foreign competition facing manufacturing industries that are intensive in the employment of non-Hispanic white males.

Acemoglu, Autor and their colleagues provide a synthesis between the economic and the sociocultural explanations of the rise of the populist right. In doing so, they provide a corrective to the recent tendency in segments of the liberal media to downplay economic factors and to focus instead on racial resentment and cultural dislocation as the primary forces motivating Trump voters.

I myself have written that

Republican voters have a strong sense of white identity, they harbor high levels of racial resentment and they sometimes exhibit authoritarian leanings.

The point here is that the two generalized explanatory realms — the one focused on race and the other on economic shock — overlap. It is not either/or but both that gave us President Trump.