Quite apart from the fact that 20 years ago, almost none of our supposed thought leaders foresaw that the United States would slide into a fascist-style dictatorship by 2025, there have been surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.

Endemic racism is often put forward as a rationale. That’s clearly true to some extent, but isn’t quite a sufficient explanation. Racism has been a feature of American history since the first slave ship hove to off Jamestown in 1619. But persistent as that has been, racism did not cause half the electorate suddenly to opt for authoritarian rule. Nor does it explain the shift of many nonwhite voters toward Donald Trump.

A more likely era than the present for a seismic political shift c

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