In their struggle to understand the Trump phenomenon, establishment pundits, political scientists and millions of flabbergasted American voters have settled on a long list of sober-sounding socioeconomic explanations: Deindustrialization. Anomie. Racial animosity. The rising up of a dislocated America.

Perhaps. Surely, Donald J. Trump is where he is because of a new force in American politics, one very different from the old politics as usual. But the difference is not just socioeconomic. It’s much deeper than that. Mr. Trump has survived disasters that would have sunk an establishment politician because he and his supporters have a fundamentally different worldview. Mr. Trump isn’t just the first reality-TV candidate; he is the first candidate to embrace a slice of the country that sees everything, even the fate of the nation, through the logic of cutthroat American capitalism.

The world that Mr. Trump inhabits is today’s Other America, the seamy, blustering, hustling and huckstering underside of our fabled brightness and optimism. For those who can afford to idealize politics, it may seem alien. But for many people, it is everyday life.

The political and business worlds have always overlapped. But we used to — and the establishment still does — expect politicians to adhere to a minimal level of honesty and consistency. We judge business tycoons differently; within the confines of the law, more or less, we expect them to lie and cheat their way to the top, and we assess them solely on how quickly and efficiently they get there. The reputation of Ulysses S. Grant was tarnished by the mere association with the unseemly practices that earned his Gilded Age counterparts in the business world everlasting glory.