Well, it’s a good explanation of how he still feels the cognitive dissonance, but seeing is believing and he is liking what he sees. Very smart man. Welcome back to him, if this is the case.
In sum, it is far more difficult in 2017 to enact conservative change than it was 40 years ago — not necessarily because the message is less popular, but because government is far more deeply embedded in our lives, the Left is far more sophisticated in its political efforts to advance a message that otherwise has no real record of providing prosperity and security, and the Right had avoided the bare-knuckles brawling of the Left and instead grown accustomed to losing in a dignified fashion.To the losers of globalization, the half-employed, and the hopelessly deplorable and irredeemable, lectures from the Republican establishment about reductions in capital-gain taxes, more free-trade agreements, and de facto amnesties, were never going to win the Electoral College the way that Trump did when he used the plural personal pronoun (“We love our miners, farmers, vets”) and promised to jawbone industries to help rust-belt workers.
The final irony? The supposedly narcissistic and self-absorbed Trump ran a campaign that addressed in undeniably sincere fashion the dilemmas of a lost hinterland. And he did so after supposedly more moral Republicans had all but written off the rubes as either politically irrelevant or beyond the hope of salvation in a globalized world. How a brutal Manhattan developer, who thrived on self-centered controversy and even scandal, proved singularly empathetic to millions of the forgotten is apparently still not fully understood.