I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that some people get what they want, and some people don’t, for reasons both beyond and within their control. Many of the men who marched on Charlottesville, for instance, appear to have come of working age since the housing market crashed. Maybe they feel resentful the economy went belly up just as the world was asking them to take care of themselves.

Yet most of the people who fail to make it big in this country still honor the social contract, regardless of whatever prejudices they harbor. I worked construction with a klansman, yes, but I also worked alongside Jamaicans, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Italian-Americans. If those guys wanted a pure ethnostate, I still don’t know because they only ever articulated their most immediate and relevant concerns: for the guy on the back-hoe not to crush them with the bucket when they were down in the hole and that we all get off early enough on Friday that we could cash our paychecks before the bank closed. People also wanted rides to job sites and rides home. And do you know how they got those things? By not being assholes to the people who could provide them. The vast majority of us–from high school dropouts to economic elites–know you can’t expect caution and courtesy if you’re not offering the same.