Is it 'that simple', just dumb hicks screwing themselves politically, like they might screw their cattle or inbred cousins?

Consider whether if they have no alternatives?

The democrats have abandoned all pretense of representing the working class on the excuse of being safe for business, supposedly necessary for electability (they've almost entirely abandoned rural electorates), fearful of the mere accusation of class warfare (As if that was the ultimate political slur and an immediate condemnation, echoes of McCarthy and union busting). Like they would suddenly turn the ship of state afterwards after being elected, look at Obama after Bush, nothing fundamental changed.

Class warfare exists, it's just the American public is losing at it badly. The republicans blame a fictitious Liberal elite for everything, deliberately coopting and perverting the language that might actually describe the situation, while Democrats abandon it on the pretense of it being some political taboo. This just further feeds the myth of a liberal elite, when they're really just two sides of the same business party with narrow, largely meangingless, cultural and ideological differences. The republicans tilt against democrats on meaningless cultural issues, so that leaves the public (absent any viable third parties) to stew in their grievances and vote their conscience on those, with predicable results. Nothing changes and things get worse for the non affluent majority.

This seems to be why many voters turned to Trump in the last election. He was the only politician (besides Sanders who was turfed out by the democrats with whom he shared some apparent affinities) who represented to many someone outside the regular Republican mold and definitely not in the Democrat and is a sort of 'fuck you' to the two party system. If this latter was an engineered 'backlash' choice to their patented ordinary backlash political movement, to result perhaps in an even more extreme right wing republican corporatism (this isn't entirely clear) it seems to have worked like a charm.