Identity, as academics define it, falls into two broad categories: “achieved” identity derived from personal effort, and “ascribed” identity based on innate characteristics.

 Everyone has both, but people tend to be most attached to their “best” identity—the one that offers the most social status or privileges. Successful professionals, for example, often define their identities primarily through their careers. For generations, working-class whites were doubly blessed: They enjoyed privileged status based on race, as well as the fruits of broad economic growth.

White people’s officially privileged status waned over the latter half of the 20th century with the demise of discriminatory practices in, say, university admissions. But rising wages, an expanding social safety net and new educational opportunities helped offset that. Most white adults were wealthier and more successful than their parents, and confident that their children would do better still. That feeling of success may have provided a sort of identity in itself.

But as Western manufacturing and industry have declined, taking many working-class towns with them, parents and grandparents have found that the opportunities they once had are unavailable to the next generation. That creates an identity vacuum to be filled.

Arlie Russell Hochschild describes a feeling of lost opportunity. Her subjects felt like they were waiting in a long line to reach the top of a hill where the American dream was waiting for them. But the line’s uphill progress had slowed, even stopped. And immigrants, black people and other “outsiders” seemed to be cutting the line.

For many Western whites, opportunities for achieved identity—the top of the hill—seem unattainable. So their ascribed identity—their whiteness—feels more important than ever.

The formal rejection of racial discrimination in those societies has, by extension, constructed a new, broader national identity. The United States has a black president.

But that broadening can, to some, feel like a painful loss, articulated in the demand voiced over and over at Trump rallies.

The loss of that comforting hum has accelerated a phenomenon that Robin DiAngelo, calls “white fragility”—the stress white people feel when they confront the knowledge that they are neither special nor the default; that whiteness is just a race like any other. Fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. And it can trigger a backlash against those who are perceived as outsiders.

Even some conservative analysts who support a multiethnic “melting pot” national identity worry that unassimilated immigrants could threaten core national values and cultural cohesion.

The struggle for white identity is not just a political problem; it is about the “deep story” of feeling stuck while others move forward.

There will not likely be a return to the whiteness of social dominance and exclusive national identity. Immigration cannot be halted without damaging Western nations’ economies; immigrants who have already arrived cannot be expelled en masse without causing social and moral damage. And the other groups who see to be “cutting in line” are in fact getting a chance at progress that was long denied them.

Western whites have a place within their nations’ new, broader national identities. But unless they accept it, the crisis of whiteness seems likely to continue.