They dominate key sectors of the economy, including Wall Street, the media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And because coastal elites are viewed by many in the heartland as “minority-loving” and pro-immigrant, they are seen as unconcerned with “real” Americans — indeed as threatening their way of life.

What happened in America in 2016 is exactly what I would have predicted for a developing country pursuing elections in the presence of a deeply resented market-dominant minority: the rise of a populist movement in which demagogic voices called on “real” Americans to “take back our country.”

Trumpism is part of a global pattern, but Europe’s right-wing nationalist movements aren’t the only or even most apt comparison. American politics today has as much in common with the developing world as it does with Europe. Time and again, vote-seeking demagogues with few political credentials have swept to power in developing countries by tapping into deep-seated resentment toward a market-dominant minority. President Trump is neither the world’s first “tweeter-in-chief” nor the first head of state to star on a reality TV show. That would be Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Venezuela, too, has a market-dominant minority: the light-skinned, insular elite that historically controlled the country’s corporate sector and its staggering oil wealth. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Chávez swept to victory in 1998 on an anti-establishment platform, attacking the mainstream media, the “rotten oligarchs” and a slew of “enemies of the people.” He won over millions of the country’s have-nots with unscripted rhetoric that struck elites as vulgar, outrageous and often plainly false. But Venezuela’s majority saw in Mr. Chávez a leader who looked and spoke like them.

Seeing coastal elites as a market-dominant minority is sobering. In my research, I’ve found no examples of countries successfully overcoming this problem. On the contrary, all over the world, when this dynamic takes hold of a nation’s politics, a result has been an erosion of trust in institutions and in electoral outcomes. Countries lurch toward authoritarianism, hate-mongering and an elite backlash against the popular side of democracy.

Signs of all these developments are present in the United States. As to the latter, right before the 2016 election, a book review in The New Yorker discussed “the case against democracy,” including proposals to impose knowledge tests on voters (something Latin American elites have been writing about for a long time). The review quoted from a book by Jason Brennan, a libertarian political philosopher at Georgetown, who wrote that “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”

This is not the way forward. If any way out exists, it will have to be both economic and cultural. Restoring upward mobility should be viewed as an emergency. Upward mobility is what made America different from developing countries that have disintegrated. Research shows that zero-sum political tribalism is worst under conditions of economic insecurity and lack of opportunity.

But the emergence of coastal elites as an insular minority is also rooted squarely in the breakdown of national unity — in the fracturing of our country into two (or more) Americas in which people from one tribe see others not just as the political opposition, but as immoral, evil and un-American. America desperately needs leaders with the courage to break out of the tribalist cycle, but where are we going to find them?