My argument throughout the worst political season in modern U.S. history has been that as desperate as many Americans may be in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse, the rise of Trump has less to do with the fear of falling than the fear of other. From the first crude utterances about Mexicans during his campaign announcement in June, the hideous hotelier been selling an embrace of white privilege, an angry rebuttal to the election of our first African-American President. The methods and madness behind realizing this promise of making American white again change daily–only the supremacy is consistent. When Trump encouraged Mitt Romney in 2012 to attack Obama with the racist Birther garbage, he clearly wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Perhaps Thomas Frank and others believe that if only Kansans had been whispered to just so that none of this would have happened, but the hate speech Trump offers seems to be precisely what a surprising number of Americans want to hear.

The opening of “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Robert Kagan’s blistering Washington Post editorial:

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.•