I grew up in red America. Good people, good people, as we are always dutifully required to say. But with a dark side.

They sulked after the Civil War and they sulked some more during the decades of Democratic dominance after the Great Depression. Then, they seethed over the implicit rebuke that came with the passage of major civil rights reforms in the 1950s and ’60s.

In the wake of the realignment that came with the rise of Ronald Reagan, their power recovered, but everyone could see that the burghers of the Republican Party were just paying lip service to their id. They seemed to be afraid of something. They had suspicions and conspiracy theories. Communists (Dwight Eisenhower was one if you didn’t know) could be found under almost any rock.

There were resentments, too, though the particulars were difficult to pin down. We heard talk about the good ol’ days. Well, in the good ol’ days of, say, Eisenhower, America built the interstate highway system and did it by taxing rich people at breathtaking levels. Social security kept millions of old folks out of poverty. The GI Bill provided homes for hundreds of thousands of families. Those taxes saw untold millions of dollars taken from blue-state residents and poured into poor red states to build up infrastructure, dam rivers and electrify farms. We educated generations, essentially for free. It was a shocking redistribution of wealth, but you didn’t hear complaints about that back then, or now for that matter, from red America.

America created the world’s greatest educational system, increased standards of living by an order of magnitude, won the Cold War and built the internet – and yet, the Republican Party has thrived while consistently attacking the mechanisms that created these miracles.

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After the civil rights era came whites marrying blacks (red America was against it), equal rights for women (it was against that, too) and even acceptance of gay people, which it fought with increasing hysteria for decades. (Did you know that, into the 21st century, you could get arrested in Texas for participating in the sex act that Donald Trump mimed over a mic stand the other day?)

Red America mostly seethed. But then the latent power of this atavistic force was energised and connected by the internet. They came together first to create the so-called Tea Party and then to become the front line of Donald Trump’s shock troops.

Once this potent admixture was assembled, we saw, unfolding in real time, how their anger and resentments, absurd as they were, could be harnessed. Trump, the most extraordinary political figure of our time, did it. With yipping sycophants, two-bit bullies, canny connivers and vacuous cynics surrounding him, Trump tested the waters of violating norms once, twice, three times and then, emboldened, seemingly every day. We saw an arrogance and cruelty that toyed with vulgarity and hurtful rhetoric and then became defined by it.