51�Թ�

Brown’s older brothers became part of the lumpenproletariat until the law caught up with them.

Other people around me thought of the region’s lumpenproletariat as lazy and undisciplined, the sort that warranted whatever came their way.

“You know, I just saw ‘The Hairy Ape’ by Eugene O’Neill, and the line that keeps recurring in this lumpenproletariat protagonist in the play is ‘I don’t belong,’ ” he says.

“For the many, not the few”? One can agree with the principle, while strongly doubting that most individual voters want to see themselves as part of a seething, undifferentiated mass, “the many”, or the lumpenproletariat.

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t: The grand bargain the Republican elite thought it had struck with the loonier fringes of the lumpenproletariat came undone in spectacular fashion in 2016.