It seems so obvious, and yet so startling to see middle-class white American men, arguably the most privileged human beings on the planet (excluding, of course, hereditary aristocracies and the upper classes) fuming with such self-righteous outrage. (The comedian Louis CK gets this sense of privilege: "I'm a white man," he says, "How many advantages can one persona have?"

What unites them, I came to understand, was a sentiment I called "aggrieved entitlement." Raised to believe that this was "their" country, simply by being born white and male, they were entitled to a good job by which they could support a family as sole breadwinners, and to deference at home from adoring wives and obedient children. And not only do their kids and their wives have ideas of their own; not only is the competition for those jobs increasingly ferocious; they've also been slammed by predatory lenders, corporate moguls, Wall Street short-sellers betting against their own companies and manipulated by cynical elites into believing that their adversaries were not the ones downsizing, outsourcing and cutting their jobs, but those assorted others -- women, immigrants, gays, black people -- who were asserting their claims for a piece of the pie. The middle class white American man expected to be more Don Draper, all self-made , in control, and upwardly mobile. Instead he's more like William Foster, another fictional character who's fallen off the cliff into that dark abyss of despair, violence and madness.

Today's Angry White Men look backward, nostalgically at the world they have lost. Some organize politically to restore "their" country; some descend into madness; others lash out violently at a host of scapegoats. Theirs is a fight to restore, to reclaim more than just what they feel entitled to socially or economically -- it's also to restore their sense of manhood, to reclaim that sense of dominance and power to which they also feel entitled. They don't get mad, they want to get even -- but with whom?

Alas, that multicultural, democratic train has long ago left the station; it's impossible to imagine America rolling back the gains made by women, LGBT people, immigrants, people of color. Angry White Men may still strew some obstacles on that global path to greater equality, making the road bumpier. But its direction is clear. And the loudest screams are coming not from those whose fortunes are rising, but from those over whom the engines locomotives of history are rolling.