Trump and the blindness of America’s elites

In a few days, what liberal Americans described as a "mortal danger" to democracy will come to be: Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term as president of the United States. The many different interpretations of this defeat in the Democratic Party, in the "progressive media" and in academia now constitute a vast and contradictory literature - from fierce self-criticism for the failure to listen to the anxieties of the working class to the complacent reading that racism and sexism are to blame for everything. In the din of confusion over this electoral loss, one voice stands out: that of Musa al-Gharbi.

Al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor at the School of Communication and Journalism of Stony Brook University, and a fellow in sociology at Columbia. He is the author of "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite" (Princeton...