I believe that Trumpism is being driven primarily by cultural anxiety — by dissatisfaction with cultural change and perceived cultural decline. “Make America Great Again” is clearly about fear of national decline, but it is not primarily about economic decline. Trump’s complaint is that “we never win anymore,” not a narrow protest that other nations are taking away our jobs or that wages are stagnant. It taps into fears that something has gone wrong — with our economy but also with our position on the international stage, with our values, with our families, and with the maintenance of law and order.

Further, it could not be more obvious that Trump voters are mostly indifferent to policy. Trump’s appeal is in his brash confidence, his celebrity, and his refusal to bow to the political correctness that is newly ascendant. Indeed, for all the chin-stroking over Trump’s success, there has been little discussion of the role that campus-based PC activism and, more recently, the Black Lives Matters movement have played in stoking the fears of cultural traditionalists. One does not need to be a reactionary or a Trump fan to view, for instance, the disruption of Bernie Sanders rallies by activists, the shutting down of Trump’s Chicago rally, or the silencing of controversial views on campuses as destabilizing forms of incivility.

The idea that Trump’s success primarily reflects the failure of conservative policies to address the economic concerns of its base gets things completely backward. Those whom public-opinion analyst Sean Trende calls “cultural traditionalists” are in the Republican party today because they left the Democratic party beginning in the 1960s. Those who rejected liberal cultural positions related to civil rights, feminism, the counterculture, secularism, and anti-authoritarianism fatefully were embraced by the Republican party.

But the complaint of these cultural traditionalists, Trende notes, is fundamentally with “cultural cosmopolitans” — the highly formally educated, careerist, metropolitan, and culturally liberal elite that runs the country. These cultural cosmopolitans dominate both parties, but their liberalism most clearly finds a home with the Democrats. And liberals have been winning the culture wars pretty decisively over the past couple of decades.