This election was never about Trump. It's about his voters. Not the alt-right characters that snuck into the debate, but about the people who let them in through their own pain. The live in Rust Belt and Appalachian towns that built America into the envy of the world, but displaced now by trade and new technology they're left to envy a world that passed them by.

The first step is addressing Trump's base. Not white nationalists on the fringes or partisan Republicans scared of losing the Supreme Court, but a forgotten working-class. After all, the greatest indicators of support for Trump are whites with no high school diploma, and those who report "American" as their ancestry on the census or who live in an "old economy" based on construction, manufacturing and trade.

These voters live in places like Youngstown, Ohio that "benefited disproportionately from America's economic advantage in the post-World War II era," says Yuval Levin, the founding editor of National Affairs and the author of "The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism."

They worked in furniture factories and textile plants and raised families in communities where it "once was possible to build a middle-class life without a college education," says Levin. Over time the factories closed, industries left town and the best and brightest went off to college and never came back.

The American century gave way to a globalized era where automation and the rural brain drain left blue collar communities uniquely susceptible to cultural decline. "If a place can have post-traumatic stress disorder these places have it," says John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock a former steel town in Western Pennsylvania. "They watched the bottom drop out."

Trump's faithful aren't the poorest folk in these neglected parts of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. Those Americans gave up on the system entirely. Trump's followers are anxiously falling out of the middle-class and can't afford to retire. Their jobs were destroyed by smartphones and they're too old to enroll in community college with their kids.

Western civilization went from rewarding their hard work to rendering them useless, so Trump's Americans mourn the economy they built with their own sweat. Their heart is broken and they feel no sense of honor in the call center or behind the counter of the dollar store. They don't want welfare. They just want their dignity back.

The Democratic Party cut their cultural connection to these Americans, Republicans took them for granted and it took Washington almost a decade to realize working-class whites were dying from their own despair. It was too late.

Trump promised victories when no other politician seemed to care. But he's a false idol taking advantage of honest fears. "To go to the Rust Belt and say you're going to bring back steel, that's just not going to happen," says Levin. "It's a politician lying."

Trump's Americans have legitimate grievances over wage stagnation and underemployment but their candidate channels those frustrations in dangerous and unhelpful ways. "He takes complex problems and projects them on simple villains," says J.D. Vance, the author of the bestseller "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." "Free trade is not perfect but if you completely unwind trade agreements the factories still aren't coming back."

Protectionism is a race in the wrong direction. The real issue is a loss of power and it's a harder one to solve.

"The American Dream is about being self-sustaining and independent," says Gracy Olmstead, an associate editor of The American Conservative. "But people don't think that's viable anymore." From Appalachia to a deindustrialized England that voted for Brexit there is a yearning for respect from people who want their lives to matter again.

"This sense of isolation, of being on our own, is one of the most underappreciated facets of life in the 21st century," says Levin, who sees social atomization as the underlying issue. "There's loneliness, a sense of powerlessness, that if we can't get the large national government to solve our problem there aren't solutions."

"We've lost the habit of looking for power and connection in the school board, the church and local government," says Levin, who feels the way forward is through subsidiarity. By restoring the middle-layers of society we can achieve the goal of "creating a place that's safe, economically viable and culturally beautiful," says Olmstead. "A place we want our children to grow up in."

Counties and municipalities should be experimental governments, embracing new urbanism and supporting apprenticeships to open doors to the middle-class, co-ops and work-councils to give employees an ownership stake, investments in high speed broadband, timebanks to increase neighborhood interaction, community land trusts, credit unions and private development organizations to support startups through microloans and subsidized rent. "Get as much money circulating as possible and grow local business so you have people who care about the town," says Joel Rogers a professor of law, political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the proponent of productive democracy.

"It's not realistic to think you can bring it all back," says Fetterman. "But we can't all move to San Francisco."

Gridlock fueled the rise of Trump, and learning the lesson, both parties can help distressed communities rebuild by raising the minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in infrastructure and vocational training, and bolstering the Trade Adjustment Assistance program by providing wage supplements to displaced workers. "We've done a terrible job of helping people who've ended up on the short-end of the stick," says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

There is also a renewed interest in the ideas of Justice Louis Brandeis. Elizabeth Warren gave a speech last June entitled "Reigniting Competition in the American Economy," that has been resonating in Washington D.C. according to Barry C. Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, who argues that antitrust law is the best weapon for American populism.

"Entrepreneurs are losing their ability to build a business because power is so concentrated against them," says Lynn. America's four biggest banks are larger now than before the recession, Walgreen's, CVS and Rite Aid operate 99 percent of American drug stores, and Wal-Mart dominates the sale of American consumer goods. "Wal-Mart is a loss to community," says Rogers. "It hurts other retail, burdens and frays the safety net, and corrupts local politics. It adds lobbyists, not Little League."

And there's bipartisan support for restoring competition in the marketplace. "There's a conservative and a liberal argument for a recommitment to breaking up concentration," says Levin. "For the same reasons conservatives worry about big government we ought to worry about big business."

"A sudden awakening has taken place," says Lynn, who recommends breaking up Amazon and Comcast and banning price discrimination. "What we have to do now is get the word out. You can be in control again. You can be in control of your own communities by using government to make business smaller."

Repulsed by the dark authoritarianism and anger of Trump's campaign, we must salvage American democracy by making it work for everyone. "This election has been healthy because it put a spotlight on a part of America that isn't doing very well and which hasn't been a central focus of public policy for quite some time," says Galston.

Now they should be. Whether it's rehabbing federalism, using antitrust laws to bring down Goliath, or passing the American Jobs Act we know of ways help. But Trump's "I alone can fix it" message is poison for working-class Americans because it feeds their sense of helplessness. "Aside from being weird and messianic it's completely wrong," says Fetterman.

The antidote is to find healthy and meaningful ways to "empower people with authority," says Levin. "To make them matter, to get them to care." But we cannot ask working-class whites to care if we don't care about them. "There's an attitude of snobbery toward the Trump voter," says Olmstead. "We need to foster an actual conversation and listen to reality on the ground."

Not every Trump supporter is a racist bigot or an angry old man who yells at members of the press, and even if they were, they're still human beings with families. "Bad things happened and people lost faith that good choices and hard work can produce good outcomes," says Vance.

"The source of my hope is my pessimism," says Levin. "People know things are going poorly and we're not going to solve problems on the course we're on. But that doesn't mean revolution or burning down the house. It means trying different ways."

"I think people are waking up to the real struggles and I think compassion and understanding go a long way," says Vance. Trump is going to lose. And this election will be ultimately be defined by what his voters do next, and whether they can learn to take ownership of their lives even though the deck is stacked against them.