My only claim to prescience this campaign season occurred after I read the book Hillbilly Elegy about poor white country people in Kentucky and Ohio.
Based on that book, I found myself arguing pretty much alone--not angrily or resentfully, but only vigorously--with good and admirable and eminent liberal-minded friends bunched around a dinner table.
I contended that it was the proud heritage of the Democratic Party to connect with and champion working people, but that the modern version had abandoned those people and left them to the demagogic appeal of Donald Trump vowing to make America great again by retreating impossibly from a global economy.
The pushback from around the table was that it was the other way around, that those people had abandoned Democrats because of the party's brave evolution into championing rights for gays as well as sanely advocating reasonable laws to ban assault-style weapons and apply uniform background checks to all gun purchases.
Some of those people whose abandonment I was lamenting were racists, I was told, and I shouldn't blame Democrats for the Republicans' cynical exploitation of ignorance, resentment and hate.
One fellow, a fine fellow, suggested Democrats shouldn't worry about the situation I described because they had forged a new and election-winning coalition consisting of white liberals such as themselves, gays, blacks, Hispanics, other minorities, suburban white women and millennials.
But Democrats connected with these white working-class voters as recently as the 1990s, I argued.
Bill Clinton was one of them, telling them he felt their pain, reeling off the supermarket prices of bread and milk and eggs, coming from a rural town and getting raised by an abusive, alcoholic car dealer of a stepfather, cavorting with a small-time lounge singer and talking about Chevrolet El Caminos with AstroTurf in the bed.
It's culture, lifestyle, not policy.
But now, I argued, the Democratic candidate for president named Clinton gave quarter-million-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs in which she said she would tell Wall Street one thing and the unwashed another.
FDR was an elite, for heaven's sake, I was reminded.
Yes, but he had this thing, I countered, called a New Deal, which--help me, please--was for ... whom? Could it be ... poor people?
And who came after FDR for the Democrats? Was it a rural-rising former haberdasher from Missouri lacking a college education and givin' 'em hell with plain talk, and whose name was ... what was it ... Truman?
I'm not sure I was right. The others may have outscored me with points about racism and guns and a world that changes even as some people can't or won't change with it.
But, by golly, I was prescient.
Hillary Clinton narrowly won the nationwide popular vote but lost the election because the black vote for her was down a little from four years before, while the white working-class vote was up a little and going four-fifths for Trump.
She lost Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by a little more than a scant 100,000 votes cumulatively. I can't prove it, but I assert with my confidence, that those were Hillbilly Elegy voters giving their favorite symbol, the middle-finger salute, to Hillary, to Democrats, to Washington, to Wall Street, to the culture, to the global economy, to all the fine people sitting around that dinner table.
Hillary and the Democratic elite gathered Election Eve for a swanky rally in Philadelphia at which rocker Bruce Springsteen appeared. The political analysis was that this singer-songwriter would appeal to white baby-boomer suburbanites who surround Philly and had been reveling at his four-hour revivalist concerts for five decades.
They had evolved from being "born to run" to staying put.
Springsteen lives on a big farm in New Jersey and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is now a best-selling author.
On this night in Philadelphia he strummed his guitar as he berated Trump with Democratic National Committee talking points.
In another time, the big Election Eve Democratic rally might have taken place in Youngstown, Ohio. Springsteen might have been there to perform his song called, appropriately, "Youngstown."
Here's how it goes: "Well, my daddy come on the Ohio works when he come home from World War II. Now the yard's just scrap and rubble; he said, 'Them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do.' These mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars. We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam. Now we're wondering what they were dyin' for."
But, no, on this Election Eve, the only political music anybody was bothering to try to sell Youngstown was the phony off-key "gone-country" bellowing of a ball-capped, mega-rich demagogue from Manhattan.
Youngstown's county voted Tuesday for Hillary, but the margin was only 49-47. In 1992, Bill got 51 percent, but that was a 27-point rout over two viable rivals, including Ross Perot. In 2000, even an out-of-touch Democrat like Al Gore got 60 percent.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/13/2016