The short answer is, well, it's complicated. Racial and economic anxiety are closely intertwined. Sometimes wage stagnation can be a necessary but insufficient condition for the politics of racial backlash. But other times it's not even that. Why? Because it's not only how you're doing that matters, but also how you're doing compared to everyone else. Which is to say that even being better off doesn't stop people from wanting to be better off than somebody else—especially somebody who doesn't look, sound, or worship like they do.

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And that brings us to the longer version.

1. Trumpism isn't just happening here. It's happening everywhere. In Britain, it's the U.K. Independence Party; in France, the National Front; and in Germany, the aptly-named Alternative for Germany. Indeed, even erstwhile socialist utopias like Denmark and Sweden have seen right-wing populists rise to the top of the polls in recent years. Not to mention that these type of nationalists have actually already won power in Hungary and Poland. They're all anti-immigrant, some to the point of being xenophobic. And they all stress "putting their country first," whether that means no longer paying into Europe's budget, no longer paying for Europe's bailouts or no longer doing what Europe tells them to do.

You can see some hints of this in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Japan, too. Although nativism hasn't played much of a role in that country because it's such an ethnically homogeneous society, there's the same emphasis on patriotism, the same call to restore lost greatness and the same willingness to use illiberal means to achieve these political ends.

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A global phenomenon has global causes. And in this case, there are two possibilities: economic anxiety over stagnant incomes and cultural anxiety over race and immigration. As we've said, it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

2. Trump supporters have real economic grievances, but so do most people. It's true, as Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell has found, that Trump voters are less likely to have a college degree and more likely to live near places where white people die younger and it's harder to move up the income ladder. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're worse off than everyone else. They aren't. Trump's backers don't tend to be unemployed any more than usual, don't tend to have stopped looking for work any more than usual, and they actually tend to earn higher incomes than usual — if they aren't retired, which many of them are. And for all Trump's rhetoric about bad trade deals and mass immigration ravaging our economy, his voters haven't been particularly hard hit by those concerns. In fact, it's the opposite. "Trump's support," Rothwell writes, "falls as exposure to trade and immigration increases."

Trump voters, in other words, tend to be blue collar workers who are decently middle class. Now, that doesn't mean they can't be scared about their and their families' futures. But it does mean that something other than just economic anxiety must be behind Trump's support, otherwise low-income whites who really have lost their jobs to outsourcing would be more likely than everyone else to vote for him—or, in the case of low-income blacks and Hispanics, to vote for him at all.

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3. Trump voters are more intolerant. The elephant not in the room, but in the Republican Party, is race. It's not just that 87 percent of Trump backers have said they agree with his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, but as a whole Trump supporters are more likely than other Republicans to view whites better and minorities worse. They also tend to live in places where racially charged Internet searches are more common.

And like Trump himself, a majority of his supporters subscribe to racially-tinged conspiracy theories about President Obama. Even though it's been disproved over and over and over again, 59 percent have said think that Obama wasn't born in the United States, and 65 percent have said they think he's a Muslim.

4. But birtherism isn't just a target for late-night ridicule. It might be the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism. Now, on the one hand, racial bias doesn't seem like it's any higher today than it was in the recent past. As The New Yorker's James Surowiecki points out, there were just as many white people who thought we'd gone too far in giving black people equal rights in 1987 as there were in 2012. But, on the other hand, there's the fact that someone without much of a political organization outside of his Twitter account has been able to take over the Republican Party.

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One possibility--it's only a theory--is that what's driving the racial resentment is, first and foremost, the experience of a country electing a black president. Barack Obama's ascendancy has shown that college-educated whites and minority voters now have the political power to pick presidents—which is only going to become more true as the country becomes majority-minority over the next few decades. Culturally conservative whites are the losers in that scenario, and they know it.

That's a big perceived loss of status for whites who are accustomed to their race acting as a bulwark against economic insecurity, whether, as the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, that was in the form of subsidized mortgages or in public schools. The result, as Slate's Jamelle Bouie highlights, is that racism seems to have gotten more virulent in this country, and might worsen if living in a multiethnic society makes whites identify more as white. Insisting against all evidence that Obama is "really" a foreign-born Muslim could reflect a feeling among some voters this transformation is illegitimate.

5. So is it the economy or is it racial resentment? Yes. Nobody is born resenting, or being biased against, others. It's something you learn. And whether you do is a tricky question that, yes, to a certain extent does depend on the economy. It's a matter of whether you're better off than you used to be, and whether other people have become better off than you.

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It is just another way of arguing that making more money makes it easier to be a good person. That's what Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman found in his landmark book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth." "A rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens," Friedman wrote, "more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy."

People are more generous when they feel like they can afford to be, and less antagonistic when they feel like the economic pie is growing fast enough that they don't have to worry about how it's divvied up. It's no surprise, then, that 15 years of the middle class not getting a raise after you take inflation into account has made some voters more amenable to someone who sparks debates about whether or not he's actually a fascist.

That said, racial animosity is often passed down from one generation to the next regardless of the state of the economy. That's because it's also about relative status. When people feel like they're losing their position in society, either because the ones below them are getting their rights or getting better raises, there can be a backlash. It's the second-lowest rung on the income ladder that can be the scariest spot, since it's still so hard to climb, but easy to fall—which can make them obsess over making sure the people below them stay below them. And, as Mother Jones's Kevin Drum shows, that's become a much more salient reality for white men the last 40 years. They're the only group whose incomes have actually fallen over that time.

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What we're saying, then, is that an economy that hasn't created broad-based growth for a long time now, particularly for white men, may be stoking fears of a nonwhite future. A better economy probably wouldn't have doused the fire, but it might have kept it from spreading so far so fast. Now that it has, though, it might not be so easy to put out.