Before many millions of Hillary Clinton’s “everyday Americans” voted to make Donald Trump their leader, I didn’t think how a Trump victory would mess with the background story that resides uneventfully in my head. It has evolved over a lifetime, and in many ways it’s not even rational. Mostly it superimposes images from childhood and adolescence onto intersecting narratives about our democratic government as each was learned, edited, and relearned. This story about America has always looked and felt a certain way, and when Trump tramped all over it, I immediately yanked it away for safekeeping. It could no longer be left out for company; it could no longer carelessly assume a pervasive and enduring atmosphere of civic trust. What that meant, of course, is that I needed new analogies—or at least one new analogy—to replace what was reliably present in every room of thought as a counterbalance to fiery or untenable emotion. What I, like everyone, needed was an origin story for Trump’s people.

I’ve studied American history, but my attempts to make sense of the world tend to break toward literature. The national grieving and psychic withdrawal that took hold in the weeks after the election coincided with the approach of Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and a very brief moment when we think about Druids and pagan rituals involving bonfires. Our election day also arrives within a few days of Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K., a night of bonfires and burning traitors in effigy. I’m sure it was these two factors that gave me an odd but satisfying metaphor for what 63 million Americans might have been thinking when they elected Donald Trump president: The world of Egdon Heath that Thomas Hardy brought to life in The Return of the Native.

Hardy’s 1878 novel is as much about the infertile and intractable heath as it is about the doomed desires of the story’s returning native, Clym Yeobright, or the enchantress Eustacia Vye. All of Hardy’s protagonists seem to chase tragedy as instinctively as a philodendron does light. They go out of their way to guarantee their own catastrophes, to ensure that at the blackjack table of life, the house always wins. And here the blackjack winner is the heath, a landscape that can “intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.”

Located in some godforsaken part of Hardy’s imagined Dorsetshire, this “vast tract of unenclosed wild” is severe, barren, covered by furze, and as “unaltered as the stars.” While most of Britain was struggling with the transition away from Christian belief and toward scientific progress, Egdon Heath never even had a church. Its unifying center is an ancient burial mound—a constant reminder of mortality—and its residents are bound by primitive rituals—bonfires, mummers’ plays, maypole dances, the making of wax effigies. It had barely offered a living even when the whole of Britain was an agrarian economy. In the shadow of large-scale industrialization, it is absurdly unsustainable.

Hardy’s dislocated place of mind manages to evade what philosopher John Gray calls the “Christian conception of history as being redemptive or providential.” Whereas Enlightenment progress is linear and veering ever upward, the landscape of Egdon Heath forces conformity to the circular nature of existence—birth and growth, fertility and reproduction, decay and death. It more closely resembles what Gray considers historical reality: “a mix of chaos, necessity, repetitive cycles, and long periods of drift.”

It may seem strange for this economic anomaly of 1870s Britain to conjure parts of the America of 2016. But in different ways, both cultures are not only failing to adapt to rapid technological and cultural change; they are denying the reality of that change, refusing to cede an imagined past where everything was easily understood. Both are parts of capitalist empires, Britain’s still ascendant and America’s foundering. Both beg the question: Why don’t the people just leave, go somewhere else where there are jobs and opportunities? Why don’t they do that and not turn the bitterness and hatred on themselves and their families? In America you would add: Why do they cling so tenaciously to the idea of betrayal and a Lost Eden that they themselves never even knew?

At the time Hardy’s novel was published, it was becoming clear that for Americans, economic cycles (growth, panics, crashes, recovery), not natural ones, were the ones they would live by. Unfettered capitalism was the prevailing myth until the Great Depression, when there emerged a new myth about hardship and reward that reconciled unfettered capitalism with the Democrats’ activist government. When white working Americans faced globalization and the steady decline of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, they shifted their faith to the Republicans and Ronald Reagan, thinking that with small government, the good times would return. Instead, they got stagnant wages for decades and the digital version of Hardy’s “irrepressible New” at a breakneck pace.

In 2016, white Americans were a people without religion or a common God. They were no longer being paid to make things but to provide services to Americans of every class and color, and their labor was being made redundant by automation. They believed that the activist government their grandparents trusted now only worked for outsiders and people any color but white. Their relatives in small towns were plagued by an epidemic of opioid and heroin addiction, and they were expected to take the blame for many decades of climate degradation that in no way benefited themselves. In short: they found the economic cycles of neoliberalism just as cruel as the natural ones of Egdon Heath.

Those who languished on Hardy’s heath were doomed to poverty, with the one exception of Diggory Venn, the peddler who appears in scene after scene. He travels the heath supplying farmers with reddle, a red mineral used for marking sheep. The dye has stained his skin so that he is literally red like the devil.

In his Red State incarnation, Diggory would be the fentanyl dealer from Detroit who drifts through Ohio counties via Route 23, just as Joel Achenbach sets the scene in his Washington Post series “Sick and Dying in Small-Town America.” Achenbach narrows his lens to the small city of Chillicothe, classic Midwestern terrain near the Appalachian foothills and ancient Native American burial mounds. It is believed that the coils of the Serpent Mound in Adams County are aligned to the two solstice and two equinox events each year.

This is the land of both prehistoric Americans and the pill mills that the government began cracking down on in 2012. Since then, the community has seen a surge in overdoses from heroin and fentanyl. Chillicothe’s economy is not terrible—there’s a paper mill that’s managed to survive—but the despair and hopelessness are outsize. Trump’s margins over Mitt Romney’s in 2012 were highest in counties with higher than average drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality rates.

What I noticed from the Post photographs of Chillicothe’s people was the health of the land in the background. This verdant earth looks nothing like Dorothea Lange’s images of the dust bowl, where impoverished families waited out the misery of nature’s wrath with similar expressions of pain. You can see in these modern tableaux a massive disconnect between the land and its people. And yet these bleak faces seem as tragic as Lange’s and as tragically tied to their home county as the denizens of Egdon Heath. Both communities are waiting for something big and restorative to happen—something bigger than they can visualize.

Given the profound effect that Charles Darwin’s writing had on Hardy, I imagine that his notion of “the primal horde”—a group of hunter-gatherers arranged around a single, dominant male with total authority over the group and claim over the females—found some influence on his primitive heath. Sigmund Freud took this theory from Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) and, to the great consternation of anthropologists, ran with it to formulate a validation of his own Oedipus theory. In Totem and Taboo (1912), Freud says that the sons of the dominant father banded together and agreed to kill and eat him to free themselves from his tyranny. With the mission completed, they were so guilty about their deed that they subsequently forbade themselves sex with the women of their own clan. They displaced their patriarchal guilt onto a totem animal and worshipped it to assuage their original crime.

Whatever the validity of Freud’s imagined scenario, his story certainly had an impact on pop culture ideas about the restorative need for sacrifice in primitive communities. It has created a horror genre that extends through Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” from 1948, movies like The Wicker Man from 1973, and an endless stream of movies and television over the past three decades. And maybe now it’s finally showing up in our politics.

I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump expect him to make America “great” by anyone’s standards. It’s that the unilateral extremism he offers is the perfect stimulant to suppress their fears and feelings of inadequacy. It gets them excited in a way that is both erotic and vengeful. Maybe their “nativist” sympathies have arisen from a preternatural longing for Hardy’s ancient, “natural” cycles of sacrifice and renewal. If all you can see is the hypocrisy of a democratic government that you believe is doing nothing for you, then the first thing you sacrifice on the pyre is democracy itself.

“Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something,” Hardy says of the heath, “but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.”

“The final overthrow” could be the title for Book 1 of the Trump ascendancy. Book 1 of Hardy’s novel takes place on the bonfire night of November 5, when furze-cutters have gathered their produce into faggots that they carry impaled on long stakes and will soon set ablaze. Hardy explains that lighting a fire in November “indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

In his inaugural speech, Trump cited “American carnage” as a scourge he was inheriting from Barack Obama and that “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.” The prospect of carnage and blood shocked and appalled one half of the country but not the other. His people know what they want. In the godless America of 2016, they saw Trump as the reconstitution of the primal horde father, the one whose communal consumption has led to many millennia of foul times and non-delivering religious belief. They see Trump—failed real estate tycoon and reality TV star, dimwitted narcissist and Manhattan society gadfly—as the true native of America’s heartland. Now, finally, they would have a real man to worship, one who has returned to his people to initiate the final overthrow.

Hardy’s depiction of the violence of bonfires uncannily captures the yearning for a Reichstag moment among Trump’s alt-right base: “It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper story of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches below. The heath down there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a continuation of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the blaze, could see nothing of the deeps beyond its influence.” We know they’re coming, Trump’s bonfire-makers. It doesn’t matter whether he fails to produce the rabbit from the hat. His followers won’t care if he turns the country into one big, apocalyptic Gotham. Their whole lives have been lived in the slow but steady erasure of a scared myth. What they need now is someone with the guile to incinerate the surviving vestiges of that myth, regardless of how much of ourselves go with it. §