Ping. Exceptional article on how Trump won.
Skimming, looks very good and I’ll read it in detail.
But it seems to me that Trump has the ability to make populism really work, because unlike most others in the end he really is not beholden to anyone, isn’t bound by political ideology or party, and doesn’t need the job.
I still marvel at how he basically hijacked the Republican party right under from under the establishment, and then hired it’s former head to be his chief of staff!
Maybe I should ping you on this.
Populism. A simple word, yet so very complex in the mean of reality.
The problem lies withing the facts of the Bell Curve of intelligence and comprehension. Mathematically the median is the popular while realistically those to the right are better informed to solve the issues at hand.
If one is to the left of the curve, they may not understand that we to the right, have a more secure and realistically logical plan.
We can blame it on stubbornness, testosterone, estrogen, or just plain bad parenting. What really matters is that we follow logic and never allow the lazy and those blinded by idiocy to rule us.
In theory there is no difference between theory and reality.
In reality there is a great deal of difference.
I read the entire piece, a well written, if not elitist tome from a respected and erudite professor of the classics. I doubt one in a hundred understand his arcane words and terminology used to express his points, but nevertheless a nicely written piece, and in consideration of its length, a lot of time and effort went into this, not unusual for the author. My one—but not only criticism—would be the last and final paragraph, a one-sentence denouement that fails to wrap up an otherwise scholarly article.
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.
Dang, how did Trump get so smart to figure all that out? Or maybe it’s just his Judeo-Christian work ethic and commonsense patriotism shining through.