From a political standpoint, it is time to stop romanticizing today’s American “working class.” It is time to drop the noble savage imagery and face the reality is that it is a class that fully embraced the “values” of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia displayed in Mr Trump’s campaign. This embrace reflects the degraded state of working class cultural values (in the old days, it might have been characterized as a “culture of poverty”). Mr Trump made these values a centerpiece of his campaign and he was rewarded by the massive support of this electoral demographic. Consequently, right-wing identity politics is no longer distinguishable from working class identity politics.

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Mr Trump is the champion of the characters who populate “dirty realist” American novels. Carver country is Trumpland.