Liberals who barely slept last night, if at all, roused on Wednesday morning wondering what the hell happened in America to create president-elect Donald J. Trump. It would be easy to spit out the words “white people” and be done with it.

You can believe that half the country is racist if you want, and there’s no question that there’s an undercurrent of anger in Trump’s stunning rise. But that anger isn’t directed at any individual ethnic group. It’s more inchoate than that. It’s rage at institutions that people believe have failed them forever. It’s rage at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary folks. It’s rage at a cultural milieu that perceives too many non-coastal Americans as buffoons. It’s rage at the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession, in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and the two-tiered system of justice paraded on full display. It’s rage at an elite class that people feel is lined up against them.

That rage has no doubt been whipped up—by Trump and his campaign, among others. It may not always be based in reality, but it’s real.

In the final analysis, 2016 wasn’t a fear election. It wasn’t like 2004, when George Bush and Dick Cheney repeatedly raised the threat of terror. (And if we’re honest, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats this year often appealed to fear—of a Trump presidency.) No, this was a rage election: a rage built up over many years, among people who’d decided they were disrespected, abandoned, and voiceless.

Liberals weren’t completely caught unawares. We recognized the rage—how could we not? We saw it in our social-media feeds all year. We read (and wrote) endless articles featuring reporters edging out to Red America, armed with a notebook and a pretense of empathy, to see what Trumpism was all about, why the fever seemed to be running so high among these people.