There's a bunch more like this. It sounds like there are 10's of millions of Americans who are feeling left behind with no way to catch up.
How true is this? I'm sure I don't know, but it's much more credible than anything else I've come across.
I don't see how the US is going to develop more social programs without addressing the issues of all those Republican voters.
Multiple things happening at once I think. There are people of all backgrounds finding themselves left out of the so-called American dream. For many, it has always been this way - the current structural unemployment is only the latest version (African Americans, poor women, POC). For many of the white working class Republican voters this is a relatively new thing. They may have always been poor or middle class, but the late 20th/early 21st century thing of moving backwards isn't something they grew up expecting. It hasn't happened in almost 100 years, it sucks and it's scary.
Neither party has really bothered to try to help any of those people. Almost nobody has ever set out to help the traditionally marginalized like African Americans, and nobody is stepping up to help poor white people either. Neither party espouses any policies that can meaningfully change those circumstances, though the Democrats occasionally talk a good line.
There are plenty of sound economic, education and health policies that have been proven to work in various other places in the world, and have proven track records for actually improving economic outcomes across the board (including for the rich). Neither major party is willing to even try to make them happen, likely because they are so thoroughly bought and paid for by those who benefit from the status quo (i.e. HMOs etc). So people are still more alienated.
When people are scared and nobody seems to give a shit, when evidence based policy making doesn't happen (or doesn't happen with goals that help regular people), the appeal of romance based politics starts to rise. People want to get excited and feel like they have some role, even if it is in cheering for a charismatic authoritarian who will actually just use them for his own gains.
There are many historical examples, particularly in the 20th century. Most of them end in tears - any engineer can tell you that a system built on optimism and passion and 'I want that' won't last long in a world of physics. Wanting something really hard doesn't actually make it happen, evidence based policy and feedbacks make things happen. Authoritarian economies (left or right) tend to crash, leaving only the cronies of the leader enriched, if they haven't gone and lost a war somewhere.