I very much appreciate Bryan Gervais and Irwin Morris’s thoughtful review of American Discontent, a book, which in the end, they seemed to like quite a lot. But I take issue with their two main criticisms.

First, they suggest that my historical account of the deep structural trends in American political economy, which began forming in the late twentieth century, cannot explain why it was not until 2016 that someone benefited from these trends to win the presidency. Why, they ask, did Mitt Romney not benefit from these trends and defeat Obama in 2012? The answer lies in the idiosyncrasies that always occur in elections, which brings us back to the “myriad short-term explanations for Trump’s victory” that others have offered and that I acknowledged early in the book (pp. 3–9) and then moved to the side. For instance, had Romney been as media savvy and charismatic as Trump or less reticent to play “dog whistle” politics and invoke racial slurs during his campaign, he might have capitalized on the anti-immigrant and racist trends that Trump took advantage of later. Had Romney not been caught at a private fundraiser disparaging half the American population for freeloading off of government largess, things might have turned out differently, too. Who knows? The point is that it did not have to be Trump. It could have been someone else, perhaps even earlier than 2016, if he or she had been willing to capitalize on the economic, racial, ideological, and political trends I emphasized. But given the particularities of candidates and the immediate circumstances surrounding elections (not to mention the fact that political polarization hit a high point by the end of the Obama administration) it did not happen until Trump came along.

Second, Gervais and Morris say that “the grand themes upon which Campbell focuses are less useful at explaining how (and why) Trump won the Republican nomination” in the first place. Perhaps. But the book is not about the Republican primary; it is about the general presidential election. Everybody knows that the primaries are different. They focus much more on party activists and, as a result, often push political discourse to more extreme positions. Trump was an extremist extraordinaire. It is conceivable that had one of his primary opponents resorted to some of the extreme political positions and frames that he used, he or she would have capitalized more effectively on the structural trends I discussed and won the nomination. Moreover, just because Trump’s anti–free trade view was not consistent with traditional Republican neoliberalism, it does not mean that the rise of neoliberalism was not an important part of the story. In fact, I explained how Trump overcame this ideological inconsistency by pandering to anti-immigrant racism, while still promising deep neoliberal tax and spending cuts. Put differently, it was the interaction among long-standing economic, racial, ideological, and political trends that created the perfect storm, bolstered by a bit of luck and political acumen, and helped sweep Trump into the White House. In short, structure mattered.