How did this happen?

The first draft of this history is being written now. In the years and decades to come, we will have the benefit of hindsight, as well as more information and context, to make better sense of Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day 2016 and its implications for American democracy and global politics.

But in the immediate present, the dominant narrative for explaining the rise of Donald Trump and his fascist movement has been centered upon the “white working class” and its purported “economic anxiety.” For a variety of reasons, this is a compelling story for the American corporate news media, the pundits and other elite opinion leaders.

The white economic anxiety narrative is simplistic. It is also the result of a type of “path dependence,” whereby the answers offered are largely a function of the questions asked. The white economic anxiety thesis is also a way for the pundit class — with a majority of its members being white and from a very narrow socioeconomic background — to ignore the enduring power of racism and sexism in American society.

Here, a belief that it must be something other than racism (and sexism) that won Trump the election functions as a conceptual blinder for analysts and commentators who want to deny the ugly truth about the values and beliefs held by their fellow (white) Americans. In all, these factors are part of an effort, albeit a superficial one, to empathize with the supposed pain and anger of white working-class voters who feel “left behind” and by doing so normalize their egregious, irresponsible and hateful decision to support Donald Trump.

Most important, the economic-anxiety thesis is in many ways incorrect.

It is hobbled on a foundational level: Who makes up the white working class? Is the white working class defined by geographic region, educational level, income or cultural habitus? How one defines the white working class will in turn shape any answer about its members’ voting habits and other political decisions.

To wit: Trump won white voters across almost every demographic category. Both low-income and high-income whites supported him at rates higher than their peers backed Hillary Clinton. In fact, the typical Trump supporter comes from a household that earns $72,000 a year — significantly above the national average — and has not been negatively affected by globalization.

Moreover, if the economic anxiety thesis were correct, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans (people who have much less wealth and income than whites) would have flocked to Trump. Instead, they were repulsed by him and overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

A recent analysis of county-level census data shows, in fact, that Clinton won a higher percentage of the vote in economically distressed communities than did Trump. But Trump benefited from a statistical fluke, winning enough white voters in economically distressed Rust Belt areas to score an Electoral College majority while overwhelmingly losing the popular vote.

It was not only the much-discussed and much-pitied white-working class as a group that gave Trump the election (in combination with successful efforts by the Republican Party to suppress the votes of African-Americans, Latinos and other groups0. Nor was it only the possible impact of Russian meddling. It was white voters with college educations as well. Writing for the New Republic, Eric Sasson summarized this:

Perhaps, then, these Trump voters are the most deplorable of them all. They’re not suffering or desperate, and have no concrete reason to hate the status quo or to feel like they are in decline. They understand that Trump is manifestly unprepared to be president, have heard his many lies and insults, yet voted for him anyway. And without them, Trump wouldn’t have won. The media ought to focus on their motivations, too — and reporters won’t even have to fly to Youngstown to find them.

A recent experiment by political scientist Michael Tesler further demolishes the white economic anxiety thesis. Echoing the argument in his new book “Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era,” Tesler explained:

To quantify this double standard in deservingness we embedded an experiment in a new HuffPost/YouGov survey. We asked half of our respondents if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.” The other half of the sample was provided with the exact same statement, except we changed “blacks” to “average Americans” — a group that psychology research shows is implicitly synonymous with being white.

The results show a very strong public divide in the perceived deservingness of average Americans and African Americans.