Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

27,056 were non-Hispanic whites.37 In the late 1990s, the risk that a non-college-educated white person would die in his or her early fifties was 30 percent lower than for a comparable black person. By 2015, the non-college white person’s risk was 30 percent higher than his or her non-college black counterpart.38 Behind these “deaths of despair,” as they came to be known, lay an unfolding economic malaise. Working-class white men suffered a 9 percent income decline between 1996 and 2014.39 Marriage, church attendance, civic participation, all plummeted.40 Compared with any other ethnic group—and to whites with college educations—noncollege whites expressed most pessimism about their personal prospects in