Crucially important is the fact that rising inequality constitutes a double whammy. It raises the cost of sought-after goods and it increases the economic gap between the working class and the affluent, spurring nostalgia for what was (even if what was really wasn’t).

This point was well put in an essay, “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” by Neil Fligstein, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, Pat Hastings, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley, and Adam Goldstein, professor of sociology at Princeton, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association:

Growing income inequality in the U.S. has meant that as those at the top are able bid up the price of valued goods like housing and access to good schools, those in lower groups have struggled to maintain their positions.

A September 2014 Demos study found that median white family wealth is $134,000. Among whites in the working class, however — the bottom 32.1 percent — the average net worth is $0.

In July 2014, USA Today estimated that in the United States, where the median household income was $53,567, the minimum annual cost of living the American dream was $130,357.

The diminished status of white working class men, however, is not limited to dollars and cents. For some of these men, there is a less talked-about sense of status displacement that stems from the surge of women, including wives, girlfriends and daughters, into the work force. This has served to focus attention on the erosion of the traditional male self-image as provider and protector.

By 2011, nearly a quarter of married women (24.3 percent) made more money than their husbands. For working class white men, the economic ascendance of women taps into what psychologists describe as anxiety and anger about “precarious masculinity.”

A Public Religion Research Institute survey in March found that half of Trump’s supporters — more than any other candidate’s — believe that society would benefit if “women adhere to traditional gender roles.”

Joseph Vandello, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, who has published extensively about “precarious masculinity,” wrote in an email:

Manhood is an uncertain, tenuous status and one that is easily threatened; thus, men will often take compensatory measures to restore or affirm manhood. In this case, manhood can be affirmed symbolically through one’s vote or show of support to a candidate who embodies manhood.

For working class whites, Vandello wrote, the loss of their privileged status and loss of manufacturing jobs go to the

core of what it means to be a man in our culture — being the protector and provider.

David Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, told me by email that the practice among liberal interest groups of

highlighting group differences, cultures, etc. has contributed to Trump’s appeal, especially given that white men are often blamed for being oppressive or the source of many of the issues being protested.

The result in the white working class, Geary argues, is to sharpen the us-versus-them character of politics.

You cannot consistently have different groups arguing for equality, protesting etc. without creating an in-group, out-group mentality — an evolved bias that is easily invoked — within the U.S.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, shares Geary’s view that Trump supporters are, to some extent, responding to what they see as excesses on the left. In an email, Pinker argued that Trump

has been inadvertently aided by the left’s history of heavy-handed policing of speech about race and sex known as “political correctness.” Of course respect for women and racial minorities is not political correctness — it is just decency. But well-known excesses in the policing of speech have handed Trump a gift: he can rationalize despicable attitudes as honest reactions to political correctness. In this way he multiplies the effectiveness of his taboo-shattering campaign. Supporters don’t perceive him as merely publicizing their ugly private beliefs; they perceive him as speaking truth to power.

Many of Trump’s supporters have been left behind, marginalized by the economic, cultural and demographic transformations brought about by globalization. Trump likes to assure these beleaguered voters that he will restore their vanished status, but the reality is that his chaotic appropriation of right-wing populism — its threats and its promises — is fraudulent, as bereft of value as his bankrupt casinos.