Re “All come to look for (Trump’s) America’’ by Thomas Farragher (Page A1, Jan. 8): It’s easy for a Globe columnist to come to Ford City, Pa., and paint a wistful portrait of small-town life and lingering hope in the face of economic decline. But that’s only part of the story.

I grew up in Ford City. My father was a coal miner, until the mine closed, and then a maintenance worker and then a steelworker. My mom works at our county hospital. You can see the abandoned factories from the kitchen window in the house where I grew up.

Still, despite the exodus of heavy manufacturing, and the many people living paycheck to paycheck, there are many others who do quite well, thanks to the low cost of living. I could have pointed out to Farragher many lovely three-story homes, a few with river frontage and boat docks, proudly displaying Trump signs.

The real story in Ford City is a vague sense of feeling left behind by our changing reality. Such towns feel uneasy about “good’’ jobs increasingly moving into the knowledge economy, not just for economic reasons, but because it feels like a threat to the American ideal of physical labor. Put differently, it represents a threat to traditional masculinity, which was probably felt more acutely when our presidential choice was between a woman and Machismo Made Flesh.

We are more than 90 percent white, with college graduation rates a fraction of the national average, in a state where pundits yammer about the importance of Philadelphia and its suburbs. Factor in immigration, guns, and gay marriage, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for a backlash against urban, Democratic cosmopolitanism.

Ford City is unquestionably Trump country, but the truth is that we would have voted overwhelmingly for the Republican nominee even if he were a rabid free-trade corporate globalist.

Once you scratch the surface, it’s not really about jobs and trade.

Zack Rearick

Philadelphia