These efforts by well-meaning pundits, trying to be fair, in effect to coddle the Trump voters, and to blame us urban educated types for either ignoring those voters or mocking them, end up being not fair at all.  For one thing, many of those voters in rural areas and left-behind small towns and cities happen not to be all that underprivileged, to judge from the crowds who turned out for the campaign rallies. The matter of slighted dignity was surely a factor in the outcome of this election, as in many political developments everywhere. But voting for Trump, by way of "getting back" at the "elite," was hardly a praiseworthy moral reaction.

That said, it is true that already a long time ago Democrats and liberals got themselves into trouble when they let themselves be called "elite," a term that used to belong to GOP plutocrats. And we were wrong to fail to address the ill effects of the shifting economy.