“Economic anxiety!” is a favorite punchline among a particular segment of the political commentariat. Center-left writers employed by the likes of Vox and the Washington Post have spent four years mocking the notion that the maladies or voting records of working-class whites in middle America were rooted in material hardship.

Obviously, it was racism, they argued. Or old straight white guys are just upset that they’re losing their privilege. “Many of these people haven’t been left behind,” one Vox writer explained to a scholar who had studied rural America, “they’ve chosen not to keep up. But the sense of victimization appears to overwhelm everything else.”