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Across the deindustrialized world, decades of internalized despair seem to have given way to an open revolt against political and cultural elites. In the United States at least, there is a debate among progressives–broadly defined as “liberal centrists” and “social democrats”–on the root causes of this phenomenon. The political lessons we will have to learn from recent history are a major challenge. This article proposes to answer these questions by mobilizing the interdisciplinary field of deindustrialization studies, and to examine what it can tell us about the historical roots and underlying causes of Donald Trump’s rise.