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Great piece. Long, starts slow, and proceeds to nail it point after point. Nearly too much to comment on in a single post but it's stuff we've been talking about on FR since Trump threw his MAGA hat in the ring.

These three selections develop the pattern:

Trump soon was using the plural possessive pronoun, in speaking of “our miners,” “our vets,” and “our farmers,” in terms of endearment never heard of in past elections, as he assured the hurting middle classes that their pain was not preordained but calibrated, and that they were not the estranged but the soon to be rescued.

...the Democratic “blue wall” that had stymied both John McCain and Mitt Romney was largely a landscape of hurting white and blue-collar workers who were also culturally turned off by the Democrats’ identity politics mantras that had ignored class for tribal affiliations.

Trump suspected that elites like himself never directly experienced the downsides of illegal immigration: hit-and-run accidents, increased gang crime, drugs, swamped emergency rooms, crowded social service offices, and schools full of non-English speakers. Unlike his rivals, he neither ignored the real-life roughness of illegal immigration nor ridiculed as illiberal and worse those who experienced the consequences first-hand.

Hence the essence of a populist campaign: a sense that the difficulties of the middle class were deliberate that was helped immeasurably by Hillary's cheerful admission that they were and that she intended to continue them; a sense the the middle class were cordially, achingly tired of the incessant racist rhetoric around which the Democrat platform had coalesced; a conviction that the consequences of elitist policies were not felt by the elitists and were by the voters. That's the formula. It helped a good deal that each appreciation was well-founded in actual fact.

And one last piece in place:

Finally, Trump cemented his populist message by mocking political correctness.

That mockery proved accurate and deadly, and its appeal to certain Internet demographics were raw meat to a hungry lion. The truth about political correctness is that it's stupid and only maintained by outrageous bullying. It is terribly vulnerable to the ridicule it has earned.

And at last VDH's money shot:

What we learned on Election Day is that progressive culture—identity politics, radical feminism, boutique environmentalism, metrosexual careerism—appeals to no more than half the country, even if it’s the more influential and wealthier half. When Middle America found itself targeted by globalization and was culturally caricatured for its supposed irredeemable and deplorable habits by the smug winners of internationalism, is it a surprise that it looked desperately for a politician who promised to put them back to work and to honor rather than deride their manner of living?

And yet the losers still haven't a clue why they lost. "It was the Russians" is so pathetic one has to wonder that it can be repeated with a straight face by anyone over the age of 10. The radicals lost. The racists lost, the haters lost, and the media lost, and none of these is remotely capable of finding the answer in their own mirrors.