It's very important to realize that the US was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but it was overwhelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was far and away from the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it's a very insular country. There aren't many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away from those bad guys, enormous internal resources that nobody else had. There were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there are a lot of reasons for it, but it's there and you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters. These are people who have just been cast aside, nobody does anything for them. The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies. Working-class males are — we are supposed to call them "middle class" in the United States, the phrase "working class" is a four-letter word here — but working-class males who are supporting Trump are actually supporting policies which are going to devastate them. Just take a look at the economic policies, the fiscal policies, and others. But it's true that they are cast aside, and their values are being attacked. Their values are in many ways culturally traditional and pre-modern in the Western sense, but they are being attacked. One of the few refuges they have is the church. They are the church in a traditional community so you can't just laugh at it, it's serious. It has to be dealt with.
Noam Chomsky