Everyone is looking for what Winston Churchill called the pudding with the theme. How did people like Donald Trump get to the forefront of American politics? How did the British break sturdy ties with the Europeans across the Channel? The common denominators, we are told, are “revolution,” “down with the elites,” and “power to the people.”
Or as Che Guevara said, “Revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”
The idea of revolution obviously does not apply to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, because she is an apple clinging to a tree that has survived many shocks and not fallen. She has an innate tenacity that gives her the strength to survive, even though she is a little too ripe.
Bernie Sanders is too senior to play Guevara, and was never a stern enough candidate to actually get into the Oval Office. But he has orchestrated a mini-revolution gigantic enough to force Clinton to the left, despite her sympathies and connections to the super-rich who seek access through their enormous donations to the Clinton Foundation, her favorite charity. He rakes in millions from Wall Street in exorbitant speaking fees. Always sly and cynical, she now campaigns with Elizabeth Warren under a banner celebrating the convenience of a shotgun wedding: “Stronger Together.”
Democrats are better than Republicans at protecting their own. They long ago eschewed President Ronald Reagan’s notable 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” The Republican Party has perfected the circular firing squad, with 17 candidates bashing each other this year, leaving the loudest, richest, most uncouth and most inexperienced politician standing.
But Donald is leading a genuine revolution. Many of his supporters are seen by the elites as vulgar, rugged, and rugged around the edges, unfamiliar with political niceties, and underestimated by the vain and foolish. When Warren ridicules Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan as foolish, they respond that she is foolish. They respond with the moral clarity of those most hurt by the corrupting spirit of Clinton’s mindset. They are humiliated by the emphasis on ethnic identity of the fashionable other, and they laugh out clamorous at his joke when he calls Warren “Pocahontas,” a sarcastic dig at her claim to Cherokee ancestry. Trump’s people are tired of the self-serving self-adulation of the politically correct.
Donald’s biggest supporters are white workers. Their ridiculed lifestyles, along with their livelihoods, have been destroyed in the modern global economy. They think he supports them. They live in the neighborhoods below the gleaming city on the hill, where the waning sunlight casts a harsh featherlight on their modest homes and crumbling businesses. Many of them live in the depressed shadows of decay, where white working-class lives should matter but are ridiculed in the cultural halls because they lack what Leon Wieseltier, a cultural and political critic at the Brookings Institution, calls “moral luster.” He describes the diffuse nature of American compassion, a “soft betrayal” where compassion for what matters is highly selective.
“Because most of the white working class lives in states where electoral votes are highly prized, the national tradition has been to stop and comment on their misery only every four years,” writes the Washington Post. “And in the years between general elections, when the course of American history, or rather the interests of American politicians, did not pass through Ohio and Pennsylvania, they were met with indifference, even contempt.” These voters especially dislike the elegant “bi-coastal” Democrats who find the farms and compact towns of the flyover “culturally embarrassing.”
The white working class won gigantic for Trump in the primaries and believed him when he told them, “I’ll be back often.” They don’t feel patronized when he says, “I love the uneducated.” Democrats who brag about their feigned affection for the white working class and say they’re for Sanders are ready for Trump in November because he speaks their language.
“I want you to imagine how much better our future could be if we declared independence from the elites who have led us into one financial and foreign policy disaster and then another,” Trump told an audience in Pennsylvania this week. He is calling on them to follow the example of the British people who voted for Brexit to reclaim their future.
Donald is ridiculed for his undisciplined, instinctive rhetoric, but the polls show him winning on economic issues, as the candidate who knows how to create jobs. It’s the economy, stupid. And stupid, you need to understand that the future depends on who can put the right theme in the pudding.
