that in no way explains why a guy who thinks muslims should be banned from public office, homosexuality should be made illegal, and hitting on 14 year old girls outside their custody hearings is OK.
you kinda remind me of the time when i was at the tire shop and the tire guys locked my keys in the car and to make up for it they tried to put more tires on my car. woah guys, the answer to everything isn;t more tires. jeez.
It plays a role. The wealthy have always been the gatekeepers/crafters of public policy. They could have shifted public policy and allocated the resources necessary to educate the people and lead them away from tribal mentalities. The rich have always been, and maybe this wasn't a drift from duty so much as an expansion of existing greed and malice. But it is obvious in the past 40-50 years that a good section of the wealthy have drummed up anti-intellectualism, anti-liberalism, and anti-egalitarianism. Naturally as people join the upper class they do not wish to regress, maybe that is why they have such an easy time deciding to stack the deck and supress the people below them to maintain their relative power and perceived superiority over them. Keeping people ignorant, racist, bigoted, tribal, nationalistic, fearful, etc. has for the most part worked in their favor. But I believe even the rich conservatives that helped create the Trump culture are regretting it at last. Trump is a symptom, the logical conclusion of a culture war where one side is backed into a corner, but he also fans the flames of a fire out of control. The culture that elected Trump was long in the making. It was partially a result of deprivation, poverty, scarcity, win-lose, and not just in economical terms, but cultural terms. It's both.