This isn't hard to explain. Progressives don't have a way to talk about what it means to be a working class white man in America right now, but there are real awful things happening to this cohort.
First of all, working class white men are dying younger, largely killing themselves. 
White middle age men have the highest suicide rate. bigthink.com/philip-perry/t…
They face downward mobility. "Today’s 50-ssomethings may be part of the first generation in American history to experience this kind of lifetime downward mobility, in which at every stage of life, they have less income/wealth than did people who were their age ten years before."
White working class men deal with substantial amounts of physical pain, which is one of the reasons opioid abuse is so bad in that group.
Now of course, little of this means they are in a worse situation than other groups. But it does mean they have real problems and those problems have gotten worse over time. Working class white men are not empowered people, by and large. And they know it.
Their lives got worse under Clinton then Obama. And they listened to liberals laugh at deplorables and clinging to guns. Is anyone surprised that grievance politics appeals to white working class men? Are they any different than anyone else?
Then you have Trump and Kavanaugh, who are aristocrats pretending to be working class white males, and using grievance politics. It works. This is a confused and angry group. They are confused and angry for legitimate reasons, aka they are dying, increasingly unfree, and in pain.
Point here is that working class whites are being conned by Trump and Kavanaugh, conned into supporting aristocrats who will hurt them. Kavanaugh is a wealthy Georgetown preppy, but he's play-acting the angry working class white male. It's sad to see the con work.
There's a reason the con works. That cause is not addressing the needs of white working class men for forty years. This isn't unique to white working class men; we haven't cared about anyone but the super wealthy for decades. Most people have legit grievances at this point.
It's actually been bad for men generally. Not as bad for college educated, but bad. Earnings decline is catastrophic for high school grad men, even worse for high school dropout men.
This article by @LongmanPhil gets at the long social emergency we're in. Grievance politics works really well among every group when political leaders won't acknowledge that systemic impoverishment of the middle class is a key policy goal. washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junej…
Working class white opioid addicts are being treated like shit. It's why they continue to die. The difference in narrative tone isn't due to the race of the addicts but because the drug pushers this time are pharma billionaires from Connecticut.
