Nobody thinks Donald Trump will win the election, but we do tend to gloss over the fact that we still expect something like 50 million people to vote for him. Some of them are my neighbours. I live in Meigs County, Ohio, which will probably vote for Trump if history is any indication. Its population, of 23,500 or so, has a per capita income of around $18,000, and 20% of my neighbours live below the poverty line. It’s one of those places where the coal dried up a few decades ago. And, however depressing it sounds, it’s better than it was.

The house my children will grow up in was built in 1900 by their paternal great-great-grandfather. It’s belonged to the family ever since, each generation building on as needed from its original single room. There are a few houses like that in the family, and we moved into this one mostly because we wanted our kids to grow up as he had, running barefoot through the woods and catching tadpoles in the stream behind the house. Meigs is still an old, old place like that. It’s not uncommon for friends our age to live in houses recently made available by a family death. We buy groceries from a general store, but it’s miles to the nearest gas station or supermarket.

Some people here would vote for a Disney villain if they ran on the Republican ticket – party affiliation is an inherited trait in many families – some just like Trump. He “says what he’s thinking”, his supporters say, which baffles many observers, given what the man says, but makes perfect sense if you realise that most of my neighbours don’t pay nearly as much attention to politics as I, who’s writing this and you, who are reading it. Many people are uncomfortable with a lot of the stuff they’ve heard about him but accept it as a necessary evil: the main thing is to tell Washington elites that they’re not safe in their sinecures any more, that the common man is about to have his day. It’s all gone too far off the rails.

Pomeroy, the county seat, lies just over the river from Mason, West Virginia. Walmart tried to come to Pomeroy but the council voted against it because they didn’t want to lose the small businesses lining the main street. The company went to Mason instead and pointedly positioned its store at the end of the bridge; Pomeroy’s intentionally quaint riverfront downtown now features a rundown laundromat, some bars, a liquor store, empty storefronts and a few improbably expensive shops. All the tax revenue from the Walmart goes to Mason.

People talk about economic insecurity and usually they’re imagining some angry white man upset that someone somewhere (probably a minority, and a woman to boot) is getting more help than him. But I picture that Walmart, where it didn’t really matter what the people wanted. They made their stand; they got run over anyway. That’s a fair description of life in a place like this one.

People who admire Trump for his business acumen are simply pointing out that no matter the ambiguity about his balance sheets this is a man who flies around on a gold-plated jet, which to someone making a few hundred dollars a week seems like unimaginable wealth. Our society values a human based on their material worth; why then are we surprised when many people define “winning” and “valuable” and “admirable” accordingly?

Trump is a Rorschach test of America’s fears. To the ageing population here, his slogan about making America great again brings memories of last century, when the downtown bustled and anyone could make a solid living, assuming they weren’t too lazy to present themselves at the mine. It wasn’t ever an easy life, but it wasn’t ever this hard either.

It’s difficult to remember, given everything that has happened since, but Trump exploded on to the stage with the first primary debate by telling us that the political system really is as rigged as we’d feared: that politics is about who you can buy and sell, whose influence you can tap. We have all known it; Trump said it. And that’s where he built his base.

It’s been three years since I wrote a post online about America’s poverty trap that went viral and led to a book deal. I now have the luxury of paying attention to the world around me. But when I look at my hands I see the scars from knives and slicers and hot grease, and I remember the rage that I could not name after a decade and a half of low wages and no hope, because we all say that we live in a meritocracy and we all know it’s bullshit, but it keeps people sinking regardless.

It was bound to happen that a candidate running on fear would take us this far into the realm of the unacceptable

An unfortunate fact of capitalism, or at least the kind we practice in the western world, is that we below are turned against each other. There is political value in racial strife. As long as we can teach white people to hate nonwhite people, then we don’t have to worry about poor people realising they outnumber the rich ones.

Racists came to love Trump because he speaks openly of the racial strife that politicians have been exploiting and stoking for decades to great electoral effect. That’s what people mean when they complain about political correctness, after all. You’re supposed to hate and fear a bunch of people but not talk about it, which is nonsensical except in the lens of politics, where perception matters far more than substance.

Trump can behave as badly as he wants. It’s no worse than people expect from the power elite. America, as seen from Meigs County, is a place where bankers can unfairly foreclose on your house and then get paid by Washington for doing it – and then Washington will demand you sign the bill. His business shenanigans don’t register as shocking because it’s assumed that to get even close to that level you’ve already sold your soul; that’s just how it works. None of the bankers went to jail, and now the banks pay Hillary Clinton the equivalent of 37 years of the median wage in this county per speech to lecture for them.

The year 2016 will be political shorthand, in the way you can say “2008” and people think of Lehman and Bear and bailouts. There will be Before, and After. This year is forcing us to grapple with a lot of realities we’d been conscientiously avoiding. Trump will still walk away from this thing a winner by his lights if Clinton wins – not leader of anything, with a reputation left in pitiful dirty tatters, but as head demagogue. He’ll have millions of adoring fans and a revenue stream. He will avoid responsibility for what is to come.

Pain and rage and fear and hate are all closely connected; unleashing them all in an unexamined pulsating mass of conspiracy-laden megalomania was ill-advised at best. We have already seen violence, and we will see more.

It was bound to happen eventually that a candidate running on fear and division would take us this far into the realms of the unacceptable. We can’t stop it now. The only thing we can do – the thing we must do, if we are to save ourselves – is begin to understand that if the system is broken, it’s broken for enough of us that we can together insist on changes that suit the populace, instead of merely those candidates and donors who can afford to buy all the rivals they see on a primary stage.

Few people think Trump will fix anything but a lot are willing to vote for him. Because whatever you think of him, he’s not a vote for the status quo.