Another day, another hundred analyses of what’s going on in our country: What will happen with the midterms? What do the Democrats need to do in order to take back Congress? What happened to the collective Republican moral compass? And why in the world would any woman support Trump?

To all of these questions – and more –  the answer is simple: Trump has promised to get rid of the brown people (all shades). And if he and his merry band of thieves can’t get rid of all of them, then they will, at the very least, make sure that those brown people will be held down to the greatest possible extent, and above all, that never again will one of them be in a position of real power. They will do it in education, in healthcare, in housing, in employment, in criminal justice, and in voting rights. And to do that, they need the likes of Brett Kavanaugh to join their ranks.

What so many analysts fail to mention is the fact that there are still people in this country who are angry that slavery is over. As America continues to be more diverse, they are desperate to have someone to look down on, to enforce their sense of being of the superior race, despite their shortcomings, of which there are many. Add the presence of people from Mexico and Central America to the mix, and they are at once terrified and furious. They complain that these brown people are taking something, anything away from them – and they should not be allowed to do so. These are the constituents of Republican lawmakers: without them, they would be unable to hold on to their own positions of power. And so they march in the key of Trump.

Democrats missed this fundamental fact in the days leading up to 2016 presidential election, and it continues to elude them. I would argue that although some Democrats reveled in the idea of electing the first woman president, the repercussions of having a black man in charge for so long were in many ways insurmountable, especially in the face of a candidate promising to put an end to everything he stood for. In the end, the feel-good aura of so-called “post-racial America” – remember that? – has been extinguished. We should be asking ourselves, “How can we bring it back?” or, “Is that even possible?”

While Americans fret about foreign policy, the environment, immigration reform, the delivery of social services, and civil rights, remember this: nothing is more important to the 40% or so who continue rally to around Trump than keeping the brown people down and, above all, out.  Not even the rights of white women.