Government can't even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.
They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It's working for the big guys and fat cats -- the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.
When I visited so-called "red" states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes.
Last year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made over the course of over 20 years, and who influenced those decisions.
Their conclusion: "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.
They'd support a strongman who'd promise to protect them from all the chaos.
Who'd save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America.
A strongman who'd make America great again -- which really means make average working people safe again.
It was a pipe dream, of course -- a conjurer's trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can't build a wall along the Mexican border. You can't keep out all Muslims. You can't stop corporations from outsourcing abroad.
Nor should you even try.
Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.
Still, they think maybe he's smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He's rich. He tells it like it is.
He makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his adversaries weak.
So what if he's crude and rude? Maybe that's what it takes to protect average people in this cruelly precarious world.
For years I've heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I've listened to their growing anger -- in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America.
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