At this writing, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead is just shy of three million votes, a number the size of the city of Chicago, the state of Nevada, Kuwait. She has won more votes than any white man has ever gotten, win or lose. Barack Obama is the only president to receive more votes than Mrs. Clinton, including the one the Electoral College is expected to confirm on December 19. In fact, the difference between the number of votes for her and those for Mr. Trump has a higher margin than that of any prior winner of the presidency, including President Obama. And yet, she is not the president-elect; and yet, she “lost” the election. Is it any wonder that many of us are asking how can this be? What is it about this “auxiliary protection” of the Electoral College that allows the loser to become the winner? We find out that it’s not the number of votes, per se, that a candidate receives which determines Electoral College votes, but the states in which they are counted. Technically, this gives more weight to votes from smaller states than from more populous states. In other words, it takes almost twice as many individual votes in California to get one EC vote as it takes in Wyoming. Consequently, suppression of those individual votes should be taken very seriously, no?

So, while many are rightly alarmed at CIA revelations that Russia got covertly involved in our electoral process, shouldn’t we be equally alarmed by the number of voters prevented from getting their votes counted by our own anti-democratic polices over the last few years? In truth, there have been a rash of voter suppression laws in those very states where Mr. Trump won the most electors. Doesn’t that seem odd to anyone else besides us? Of course it does, but the mainstream media is not covering much of that alarm. We should be looking at the way districts of electoral delegates are drawn: do they maximize white dominance in elections through mapping shenanigans, as many analysts believe? Are they drawn to favor Republican districts and to minimize Democratic electors? Is it fair to weight a vote in, say, Wyoming or Utah or Michigan with more importance than one in California, New York, or Illinois? These are the questions that should be addressed.

Without even receiving the majority of votes, our president-elect is now engaged with populating his cabinet with business and military leaders who are on the record with statements as well as actions that are in extreme opposition to the opinions and needs of at least more than half the population and, perhaps, even his own voters, the working class ones surely. What all this makes us understand is that is that our political system is flawed to its very core. If we suspected it before, we can state it unequivocally now. This country has a problem. Big league. Or bigly, as so many hear it coming out of Trump’s mouth. But on the magnitude of these problems, even the left does not agree.

Some point to a specific segment of society that has been “neglected and marginalized” in their efforts to influence governmental policies and decisions to better meet their democratic needs and desires: the “white working class.” As if the needs of the working class, per se, differ by race. This “neglected man” spin plays right into legitimizing white supremacy, particularly white male supremacy in our society—only this time by “liberal” pundits, who have repeatedly betrayed people of color and women for centuries when it came time to make peace with the dominant power structure. It elevates the feelings of white people, particularly men, above the actual physical security of everyone else. The truth is the data does not support the claim. The median income of Trump voters is higher than that for Clinton, and Republicans have never done anything but oppose the economic and political well-being of the working class.

Popular as this analysis is, the working class has not just been neglected, it’s been decimated. As Republican deregulation and union busting got really rolling in the 1980s, the corporations have only gotten bigger and richer, and the good trade jobs have gone overseas. Not because China or Indonesia or Mexico stole them, but because Republican CEOs got big bonuses if the cost of labor could tank.

There are two ways they’ve achieved that: robots and a low-paid workforce. In other words, foreign countries didn’t take those jobs, immigrants didn’t steal those jobs, non-white people didn’t get those jobs; the corporate economy changed its unwritten rules to make products at home and sent their factories to countries where weekly wages are in the single and double digits. The ones left here got automated. The massive savings in labor costs, as well as OSHA and EPA regulations, went into marketing, executive bonuses, and stock dividends. In other words, there is no such thing as a “white working class.” Though there are certainly working class white people just as surely as there are working class people of all skin colors.

The brunt of consequential suffering from this corporate globalization has not fallen only to white workers; it has also been borne by people of color, who are much more likely to be working class than upper class. In fact, that kind of economic suffering has been the norm for people of color since the beginning of this country, working class and otherwise. The fact is if working class whites voted for Trump, they simply joined affluent and rich whites in that vote. In other words, white men by a wide margin and white women by a slim margin, in all classes, voted for racial not economic reasons.

And now Trump’s party has left its feigned disgust at his appalling behavior and are lining up the legislation of their decades-long dream to gut if not end Social Security, Medicare, developing health care solutions for the masses like the Affordable Care Act, and established ones like Roe v. Wade, programs that inarguably benefit us working class whites as well as everyone else. Vice President Pence’s record of wanting to end equal rights for LGBTQ people is also likely to gain traction in a Supreme Court stacked to the right. If the blustering promise to the working class of full employment with “excellent jobs, great jobs” is anywhere included in this new world order GOP vision, it hasn’t much of a chance outside the promised further expansion of already the largest military in that world. What, we ask, does Trump intend to do with an even bigger military if he wants to stay out of foreign wars?

Whether or not populism ever has anything to do with the government, we are about to see will be determined by the People’s ability to influence the coming legislation. More likely, it will be legislation that only benefits the rich and powerful, with some thrown in to keep the rest of us at each other’s throats. In other words, far from being a rejection of the establishment, it was a consolidation of power by that establishment. And they used the lowest impulses of hate and division in us to pull it off. It certainly did not strengthen or further our democratic Constitution to give a common voice for all America to be heard and acted upon, which we think bears reiterating in blog after blog:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

What Trump did was to send us back to the flaws of contradiction, omission, and oversight in our Founding Fathers’ early vision, by dividing our nation against itself and restoring power to the white male owner class, the only members of the original thirteen states who were allowed to vote. As Time Magazine so aptly put it on their “person of the year” cover, he is certainly “president of the Divided States of America,” and not the United one we grew up pledging our allegiance to.