This moment in American history was inevitable, and it was never going to be a tranquil transition. In 2004, the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, his manifesto on the tumultuous future of the American identity. The growth of black and Hispanic minorities, he predicted, would provoke a backlash among whites:

The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

Trump’s platform is a remarkable manifestation of this 12-year-old prophecy. But Even Huntington could not have foreseen that this demographic moment would coincide with an economic crisis (which would be improbably overseen by America’s first black president). History has drawn these conflicts into a crucible, and the economic anxieties and racial anxieties of today are nearly inextricable.

Some of Trump’s policy statements, on issues like the minimum wage and taxes, are like wisps of smoke—coming into existence, curling into strange shapes, and disappearing within moments. But his bedrock promises all relate to the white American middle’s central fears, including Hispanic immigration and global trade. In his first 100 days, he says, he would act to close the country. He would send additional security to the south and seal the Mexican border. He would begin the design and construction of the Mexican Wall. He would initiate plans to round up more than 10 million undocumented immigrants to send them overseas. He would potentially ban Muslim immigrants from entering the county.

It is not enough to say that Trump is a purely racial phenomenon. Nor is it complete to argue that he is the perfectly predictable result of economic upheaval. Rather, in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline. Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger—Donald Trump.

The grievances of middle-class white Americans are not make-believe, nor is their nostalgia misplaced. The 1950s was a remarkable decade for blue-collar male workers. Union membership in the private sector peaked at 35 percent. The male labor-participation rate peaked in 1951. The next year, unemployment fell under 3 percent for the only period on record. Factories that once made shrapnel turned out lawn mowers and washing machines that supplied a happy migration to the suburbs. All this occurred within an economy that was uniquely closed, as the economist Robert Gordon wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages … and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.

For white American middle-class men, especially those without a college degree, it was the best of times. What happened? The road from there to Trump is long and punctuated with many markers. But here are three significant turns: the 1968 election; the 1979 peak in manufacturing employment, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Together, these episodes made economic anxiety and promoted racial resentment a dual-headed political weapon, and Donald Trump grabbed it.