When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was over the moon. I cried tears of joy. Having lived through the fraught civil rights years of the 1960s, I dared to hope that we’d entered a post-racial era that promised a fairer America, one that came closer to the Jeffersonian promise of equality. Though I’ve never lost my admiration for Obama and his family, I was quickly disabused of my hope for comprehensive change.

The vicious reactionary backlash, led by Mitch McConnell, was rich with racist overtones as he vowed to block any initiative from the first Black president. Of course, the backlash gained strength during the first Trump administration. This included repeated efforts to kill Obama’s most salient accomplishment – the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which had made health care newly accessible for millions of Americans. Were it not for the courageous vote of a dying John McCain, this widely popular legislation would have predeceased him.

Fast forward to Tuesday’s election. The outcome felt like a punch to the gut. The contrast between candidates and their agendas could not have been more stark.

In Kamala Harris I saw a bright, compassionate woman, devoted to the cause of women and others who’ve been left behind. She promised to be “president for everyone.” It’s fair to say that, in her, I saw Obama 2.0. In the MAGA alternative I saw the frightening potential for a revanchist regime. (Trump has characterized the press as an “enemy of the people,” and we had already witnessed newspaper owners cowed from free expression in their editorial pages in the run-up to the election.) In Trump 2.0, I saw a leader who scapegoated and beat down women and vulnerable minorities, lifting up only the rich and advantaged willing to swear fealty to an autocrat.

I don’t particularly blame Donald Trump for all of this. In fact, he has emerged as a fairly pathetic old man. He comes across as an empty shell, an author of multiple failed businesses who was given a fresh start and a new, if fraudulent, persona by reality TV. He pivoted on his success in “The Apprentice” to become mayor of a Potemkin Village, MAGAland. In this utopia, he has all the answers to our myriad ills and grievances. He is a latter-day Wizard of Oz.

Where I find real fault is with the decades preceding Trump’s turn as a politician, decades of neoliberal policy that took root under President Reagan (who famously declared that government “is the problem” and went about doing his utmost to prove that notion). Deregulation, the decimation of labor unions, along with shrinking the social safety net, became orthodoxy for both Democratic (Bill Clinton’s welfare reform) and Republican administrations.

Over 40 years, as repeated tax cuts for the rich have ballooned the federal deficit, neoliberalism has increased the wealth of a few to obscene levels, as it has hollowed out the middle class and created an enormous gulf between the privileged and the left-behind. The empty vessel that is Donald Trump has been filled with projections of the righteous and entirely legitimate anger of neglected Americans.

It has been suggested that the rise of economic inequality is a cyclical recurrence of the profound inequities of the Gilded Age and the Roaring 1920s. We are reminded that these times were followed by corrections. The progressive movement, the trust-busting of Theodore Roosevelt and the progressive income tax helped rein in the excesses of the former. And the Great Depression and New Deal helped bring the latter to heel.

In this light, the Trumpist zeal to dismantle government may be seen as the crest of a wave that began with Reagan and has created our new Gilded Age – soon (perhaps) to give way to a more equitable system. The problem with this tepid reassurance is that change can’t happen fast enough for the many who are hurting. And even those privileged, as I am, to have been spared being left behind are stuck with the moral burden of living in an unfair America.