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“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” – W. B. Yeats

I have two friends who voted for Donald Trump, or at least two that I know of. Although both were born into what we might call the working class, neither of them is today in that social category – both are well-educated and widely read and, economically, both live well above the federally defined poverty level.

So what do they appear to share with the so-called “Trump voter,” as that person is so often described in the media?

Well, they are both white and male. But then so am I – my birth family was not wealthy and I loathe Donald Trump. Being white and male alone does not tell us all that much.

There is another issue, perhaps more important. From my conversations with them, they are both very disappointed with two things that modernity has brought to their lives and the lives they see around them: first, a feeling of loss of identity, drowning in a sea of the undeserving Other. And second, a memory of a lost time, a time when they could have felt whole and respected for the person they innately were, a time when they were seen, importantly, by women as well as other men, as the rightful inheriters of the tradition of power and accomplishment of white men like themselves, whose accomplishments were the pride of their country.

In a time when visions on the television screen and the computer screen and the iPhone screen have displaced not only the printed word but much of what can be seen in reality with the naked eye, in a time when hyper-links in the virtual world have come to replace sequential reason, in a time when the ease of entertainment trumps critical thinking, Abraham Lincoln’s hopeful “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” no longer rings true.

Fantasies about the past loom rosy in the minds of those who have been fooled into thinking that the same modernity which gave them the very screens that mesmerize them has simultaneously taken away the Golden Age of their rightful place in the world. The glaring simple-mindedness of that proposition raises none of the obvious reservations about its veracity that it would have before the comforts of virtual reality pushed aside the capacity for rational doubt.

Thus the belief that the modernity they experience perpetuates what must be a hideous lie: that all people are actually created equal, that people who do not share their heritage are equally deserving of exactly the same level of unalienable rights.

They believe that their own lives, their liberties and their ability to pursue economic happiness have been stolen by “those people.” And that this has been purposely carried out with the connivance of an élite of the ilk of Hillary Clinton, pandering for votes by way of the unforgivable distribution of goods and services to dark underserving masses.

Is this putting too much of a racial or ethnic spin on things? I would hope that I have simply overstated the case. I would hope that basic racism were not a driving factor, since I know that neither of my own friends see themselves as racists and, indeed, both of them have long ties to people of color who have played important roles in their lives.

But I fear that, as much as these friends would be sure to deny it, racism is the true darkness at the heart of the matter. In their case, perhaps beyond their conscious thoughts, it is a very, very deep gloom, even as it is a surface black stain on the very words of Donald Trump, words whose consequences once he becomes President of the most powerful country in the world could destroy much of the best of what America has created.