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.

Seeing red … Donald Trump has opened the door to a new era of American politics.Credit: AP

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 hard 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........

© The Age