American Affairs Journal was actually founded by a conservative nationalist as a pro-Trump journal, designed to "to give the Trump movement some intellectual heft." The editor changed his mind (and his political position) 6 months after the election, after Charlottesville.

I think that what you see here may be some amount of bitterness after watching how events play out and what actually changes. The working class he decries as powerless were his people (he grew up in a small town in South Dakota); it's just that now that we've had 3 years of Trump he sees just how ineffective it's been.