As one who has pondered the question why so many would follow a figure like Donald Trump I found this analysis most interesting and pass it along for your consideration. It is important, I think, for us to understand the “Trump Phenomenon” as I have called it, since it seems we are now playing a totally different political game. The rules have changed and new players have emerged, many of them rather frightening.

In June, not long after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination, an unusual book by a first-time author named J.D. Vance entered the national conversation. Hillbilly Elegy was, in part, a captivating memoir — of an Appalachian childhood in an impoverished family he describes (with some exceptions) as shiftless and dysfunctional, and his improbable escape to Yale Law School and a business career in Silicon Valley. But it was also an exercise in explaining the milieu in which he was raised to the people who were now his peers — to whom a poor white boy from Kentucky is a being almost as exotic as (and considerably less sympathetic than) a Somali herdsman or a Bolivian peasant. And as one result, Vance has become the go-to source to answer the question that has echoed at cocktail parties all year from East Hampton to West Hollywood: What do those people see in Donald Trump?

And the answer is, they see a reflection of their own rage at a privileged world that is leaving them behind, that sneers at their parochial loyalties, their lack of education and refusal to take part in the global rat race. Disputing much of the commentary on the 2016 election, Vance told Yahoo News, “I resist the idea that this is a reaction to economic dislocation. What’s really going on is if you take rising rates of divorce and the heroin epidemic and everything else, there’s this sense of malaise. … Trump is the first person to recognize that there’s a lot of opportunity to exploit people’s frustration and sense of alienation.”

This message defies traditional left-right analysis: Vance is equally dismissive of the economic determinism of liberals and the “culture of poverty” rhetoric from the right, usually directed at minority families in big cities. Trump, Vance has written, brings out the worst in both sides; he “inflames the tribalism of the Right” and “encourages the worst impulses of the Left.”

“My sense is that most of the people that are voting for him at this point — it’s not really about him, it’s [a] cultural protest vote,” he told Yahoo in mid-October. “At the end of the day, we really have two cultures: the culture that I grew up in and the culture I encountered when I went to Yale Law School. My sympathetic view to where I grew up is that it’s not totally unjustified to say the elites of the country are really disconnected from or condescending to the pejorative ‘flyover country.’ It doesn’t give a lot of room for people to switch their vote to Hillary Clinton.” — By Jerry Adler

With all due respect to Mr. Vance there may be a sound reason why the “elites” (among whom I must include myself) have looked down on the “other culture.” They are not only angry and frustrated, they are also armed and dangerous. But, in the end, it is imperative that we try to understand one another if we are to live together and in this regard I thank Mr. Vance for this insight into another world.