It's anything but a "personality cult." Rather its a backlash against the "cult of party" or the "cult of professional politicians." It occurred in 1828 with Andrew Jackson, in 1860 with an unknown named Lincoln who had extremely minor political experience, it occurred in 1904 with Teddy Roosevelt, who had been deliberately isolated as VP before he became pres with McKinley's assassination, but who won convincingly, and to a large extent it happened in 1980 with Reagan, who was probably the most "traditional" of all of the elections.
Trump is running an absolutely brilliant campaign in which he completely dominates the subject matter discussed, the time it's discussed, and how it's viewed. He spends absolutely nothing for media time, yet controls the media more than Reagan did. He is running not just against Dems but against the GOPe consultant class and the beltway professionals who see their livelihoods going away.
Ideology has become much less important (almost unimportant) because in two ideological elections (2010 2014) absolutely nothing was accomplished.
I couldn explain more, but I doubt it would register.
Excellent analysis - we are witnessing the birth of a historic election - that will ‘God willing’ lead to a fundamental transformation the Libs will never recover from.
Not much could be accomplished because they were mid-term elections with the opposite party as president, who could veto anything they wanted to do. Obama was the ideological choice of the left in their primary and he has accomplished many things the left wanted. Ideology matters.
Obama won the general election because most people don't understand leftist ideology. Republican primary voters themselves are surprisingly ignorant of conservative ideology, unlike Democrat primary voters who have a huge committed leftist base that drives their primaries.
It doesn't help us that ideology is so unimportant in our primaries. Leftists nominated a candidate who was committed to achieving their goals and has been hugely successful at doing so. If we don't nominate a candidate committed to our goals, our goals won't get accomplished. Trump is popular now not because there has been some decision by the voters to change whether or not they think ideology is important. It's because ideology has never been important to Republican primary voters and because they always vote on superficial, personal qualities.
EXCELLENT!