White America realizes it’s been abandoned and humiliated: Donald Trump and the Ghost of Christopher Lasch, by Gilbert T. Sewall. Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites, provides the backstory to the class wars underlying this year’s fractious election.

Trump’s armies feel the sting of comfortable, upscale, post-industrial winners who can barely conceal their contempt for those they dismiss as Wal-Mart people. The disdain for yeoman America—which is overwhelmingly white—is visceral, longstanding, and profound. …

Abandoning the left’s original intent to protect the common man, Lasch observed, progressives chose instead to pursue diversity, secularism, and cultural revolution. Families, schools, and churches were left behind. ….

Twenty years ago, Lasch was onto PC perfectly:

For progressive elites, delicate moral confections and debatable ethical positions became acts of faith. “It is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view,” Lasch pointed out. “It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic – in other words, as politically suspect.” When these novel moral systems are challenged, Lasch added, progressives react with “venomous hatred,” the toxic ill feeling that seems abundant in the 2016 election year.

Lasch rumbles “diversity”:

Diversity – a slogan that is attractive on the face of it – has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.