President Donald Trump’s magnetic appeal to lower-income, lesser-educated white Americans is a not a new phenomenon that suddenly appeared out of thin air in 2016. It’s the product of a rigid class system that’s been around for centuries, hiding in plain sight.

The background story of how this country’s baked-in class system and manipulative electoral politics combined to create the Trump presidency is skillfully told in Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”

For those who fervently believe in the American Dream — fluid class mobility, social equality, the inevitability of success for those who think big and work hard — Isenberg’s book is a reminder that cherished ideals often bear as much resemblance to reality as distorted images in a funhouse mirror.

Her theme is that we’ve had a class-based society since the first English settlers stepped off the boat onto New England and Virginia shores and that our elites have “thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification.”  In Isenberg’s view, “The relative few who escape their lower-class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance at succeeding through cleverness and hard work, through scrimping and saving,” but “personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today’s professional and business worlds.”

The early 17th century voyages to the New World, such as those that established settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown, were not, as popular history portrays them, made up primarily of idealists seeking political and religious liberty.  The expeditions were organized by merchants, officials, and ambitious adventurers with connections to the British royal court, and their goals were commercial — to profit from the resources of an unexploited continent.

The bulk of the people dispatched across the Atlantic to achieve this goal were the flotsam of the overcrowded British Isles — convicts, beggars, landless peasants, and young children of those jailed in debtors’ prisons.  These unfortunates were expected to do the back-breaking, dirty and dangerous work of building, farming and fighting.  They were considered expendable “waste,” likely to die in the process.

As settlements took hold along the Atlantic Coast, then spread west towards and beyond the Appalachian Mountains, society’s upper crust — large landholders, wealthy merchants, senior magistrates and political leaders — became as obsessed with maintaining class distinctions as the Old World they had left behind. They considered themselves products of superior blood lines or, like New England’s Puritans, of “election” by God.  They shared with their families, followers and retainers the choicest tracts, leaving most settlers landless or consigned to scrub lands of swampy or poorly watered soils and demeaning them as “lubbers,” “squatters,” “clay eaters” and “mudsills” (and later as “scalawags,” “crackers,” “rednecks,” “hillbillies” and “white trash”).

Expansion of the right to vote gradually changed political etiquette towards, if not the condition of, poorer whites. Voters, after all, had to be convinced to vote against their own self-interest in order to perpetuate class stratification.

Following independence, the states of the new United States initially limited the franchise to white men owning property. It expanded slowly over the next century to include the landless and the urban poor. The last vestige of a means-based voting system disappeared in 1969 when the Supreme Court ruled that requiring property ownership as a condition of the ballot was unconstitutional. Women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until 1920 and people of color until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As the electorate expanded to include larger numbers of voters of meager means, politicians found ways to pander to the masses while working to protect the privileges of the few. In a style known as “populism,” they became adept at mimicking the voters they were trying to woo.

While running for Mississippi governor in 1903, for instance, James Vardaman, a racist demagogue, travelled through the state giving speeches in a “cracker cart” amid a long line of cattle. Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (who became chairman in 1950 of a committee that conducted highly publicized investigations of organized crime) first ran for Congress wearing a coonskin cap. In 1970 the notoriously unhip, buttoned-down President Richard Nixon invited sharecropper’s son and rock star Elvis Presley to the Oval Office. President George W. Bush campaigned for re-election at a NASCAR track in 2004.

Populist politicians also offered voters at the lower end of the social scale targets to loathe and blame for their own misfortunes. In the pre-Civil War South it was African-American slaves, in the post-Civil War South freed slaves and convict laborers, in the Great Depression “Okies,” in the 1940s “trailer trash,” and in the 1970s and 80s “welfare cheats” and “deadbeats.”  Lately it’s been “illegal aliens.”

Against this backdrop, Trump’s popularity in 2016 seems more comprehensible. He rode the populist tradition like a surfer cresting a big wave. The son of a mega-rich New York City real estate developer, he’d never experienced anything close to homelessness, hunger or financial insecurity. Nor did he feel a drop of empathy for those who had. Indeed, he flaunted privilege, living in palatial homes, traveling in private planes, and hobnobbing with the rich, famous and powerful.

Yet he instinctively understood how to pitch his political appeal to those hurt by the 21st century economy — the internationalization of trade and finance, automation, and the rise of industrial power in China and other Asian countries.   He gave them enemies to fear — Mexican immigrants, African-Americans, Ivy League establishment figures. He trash talked  and intimated that violence was an acceptable way to get rid of those who opposed them. He doffed red MAGA baseball caps as an avatar of the blue-collar lifestyle. And all the while he promoted policies that benefited the top 1% while convincing his “base” that these were policies designed to help them rise to the top.

Trump didn’t invent populism. Instead, like his wealth, he inherited it. And now, through his false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, he’s trying to perpetuate it.

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