‘Is this a white country, or what?’ asks Andy, one of the middle-aged white men I am interviewing immediately after August’s demonstration of White Supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. He seems as bewildered as he is enraged, his voice snarling, and yet with a plaintive upward lilt at the end.
It is this enraged bewilderment that propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office, a sense that something had changed, something fundamental, something foundational, in American society. Andy might just as well have asked: ‘Is this a man’s country?’
