The liberal media, who were called ‘liars’ by Trump throughout his presidency – and with good reason in some cases – have portrayed the more whacky elements of the far right such as Qanon or the Proud Boys, as the vanguard of poor racists who have lost their cultural capital; the powerless, unemployed and underemployed white working class.

Trump treated government like he was CEO of a corporation. Indeed, some people on the far right and left, believe the US government is a corporation, run by people much lampooned in the Simpsons as The Sacred Order of Stonecutters.

Those on the inner suburban left reckon believe these people deserve little sympathy. They are either people left behind by the decline of manufacturing and the rise of algorithms or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus towards non-whites passing them on the ladder of success. This is news to working class black Americans.

I like to keep up to date with what’s happening to labour in the US as it often presages what happens in Australia. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance or Janesville by Amy Goldstein, give the reader a taste of what it’s like being white, poor and battling to keep the family together in a post-industrial US economy – and it’s got nothing to do with QAnon.

One of the most curious aspects – and this is true in Australia – is that any discussion of the working class has mutated in to a discussion about race. Even discussion of fiction now centres around power and race relations. It’s a very odd world when I join hands with Quadrant to write about the rise of censorship from the more bonkers elements of the cultural left.

There’s a kind of salty romanticism about the working class. Indeed, the myth of mateship, the poems of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, the slaughter at Gallipoli, are historical working class narratives. Think of AC/DC and Jimmy Barnes. If you go to Elizabeth, Port Kembla, Broadmeadows, Logan or scores of other suburbs and LGAs across Australia, and no one is playing two up. Survival is the name of the game.

Since the Keating reforms, many working people, including skilled tradespeople, have thrived but a large underclass has also emerged of long-term unemployed, serial contract workers, and people who are on the margins because of illness or family breakdown. And there are people on very low incomes with a middle-class cultural background – the unemployed PhD students.

In American history, politicians (think Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson) turned humble roots into a mark of “backwoodsman” authenticity, but the term poor white trash was never far away. Those undeserving of pity; who bought their fate down upon themselves.

Trump and Bannon were smart enough to realise that there were millions of disaffected working class people in America’s south and west and their vote, helped defeat Hilary Clinton.

Over the past 35 years the working class has been devalued, the result of an economic version of the Hunger Games. It has pitted everyone against each other, regardless of where they started. Some contestants, such as business owners, were equipped with the fanciest weapons. The working class only had their hands. They lost and have been left to deal on their own.

The working class label, like that of the cowboy, conjured a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts, who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity.

These people look on J-Lo and Alicia Keys singing their sweet lefty peons of love and tolerance as Joe Biden is sworn in but nothing has changed. Yet social breakdown among low-income whites is following trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans. Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness are soaring.

Indeed, anyone who has read Nomadland by Jessica Bruder (the film glosses over the book’s criticism of the poor treatment and payment of Amazon warehouse workers), will recognise the phenomena of rootlessness. There’s been a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. Many turned to Trump, who instead of helping them, slashed taxes.

It’s a fact that the trailer parks built in the US to provide housing for war-industry workers gave rise to a whole new demeaning stereotype: trailer trash. Starting in the 1970s, the new preoccupation with ethnic heritage instilled a semi-ironic pride in “redneck” identity. The upgraded self-image prefigured the elevation of the “white working class” in the years to follow. Today’s trailer trash are yesterday’s vagrants on wheels.

It is not just about economic issues and jobs. Culturally, we are witnessing a tale of two Americas that are growing more distinct by the day.

With the decline in employment in manufacturing caused by globalisation and, more particularly, automation, less-educated Americans have become increasingly less likely to have jobs. The share of prime-age men in the labour force has trended downwards for decades.

So Trump is more a symptom than a cause of America’s long-running economic and social decay. Which doesn’t change the likelihood that his woeful mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic will add to the economic and social causes of deaths of despair.

The pandemic has exposed and accelerated the long-term trends that will render the US economy even more unequal and dysfunctional than it already was, further undermining the lives and livelihoods of less-educated people in the years ahead.