I can't add or detract to the main thrust of this piece. I certainly agree that Trump received a mandate to solve a vague, existential threat to middle-class security that he is no way qualified to solve but was merely speaking to in a way no one has before.

But one of the arguments presented by the author is about the tight relationship between decreasing economic security and the decrease in marriages/kids being born to married families. This is an almost common sense proposition--the less secure you are financially, the less likely you are to get married because you're a worthless sot and married w/ children with you is a bad idea. Therefore, if we can all just have high-paying jobs, things would return to normal. And a look at America's golden age confirms the co-incidence of a multitude of high-paying middle class jobs and a prevalence of marriage/single digit percentage of children-born-out-wedlock.

But I just learned of some interesting work that suggests we've passed the simpler times where economic security equates the namesake "America" of Trump's MAGA chant, i.e. if we get all these high paying jobs back, people will go back to marrying and having kids the right way. A pair of researchers looked into the fracking boom and its income-generating effect, and therefore a possible marital-childbearing effect, on communities. The communities that experienced a fracking boom are more or less randomly located. Yet, persistently, the high-paying jobs that came to these areas did not seem to cause a return to marriage and typical martial-childbearing family structure typical of the 50s and 60s. As I understand it, once the researchers came to this point, they basically said, "welp, we have no idea what changed but culture is different" and they're not wrong.

But I bring this up because latently racist upper-middle-class Trumpers who want a return to Leave it to Beaver will never get it, even if Trump brings back the coal jobs. I'm not saying we shouldn't have high-paying jobs. But everyone has to accept the different face of contemporary culture, whatever the hell that is.