Trump's Populism

Trump’s a populist, they say.  But I see him as a somewhat kindred soul.  I was once diagnosed as a high IQ kid, but how does that help you feed the cows?  Trump spent his childhood hanging around sheetrock hangers, despite an IQ of 140 and being the top student at NY Military Academy. But when you can use words like parsimonious and surfeit, you get accepted by the elites as one of them.  Whereupon, it can be observed that credentialed elites have engaged in a concerted revolt against traditional American values of patriotism and religion.  “The rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, “are different than us.” That is, behavior that would destroy a middle class person—drunkenness, infidelity, drug use, crime—is just a small problem for elites who can fix it with a tony rehab clinic or a sharp lawyer.  True, Trump has had his divorces and lives palatially.  But there's something different about him.

Coastal and urban, the elites choose to hang around cities, by definition, the centers of wealth.  These are the leaders of the Democrats who remind one of  Europe’s nobilesse oblige aristocracy but with a modern technocratic twist. They have bought friends among the poor by supplying welfare dependency. And where the European princes wanted to save their heads from the guillotine, the Dem elite wants to be permanently elected and in power.  Thus American politics is divided along cultural lines according to the answer to Obama’s  “who we are”.  Dem cosmopolitans say America is defined by multiculturalism and diversity.  The rest of us say it is family, flag, rights and property, and faith. And the unique American Constitution that makes us the Exception-to-the-rule in nations.

And boy, did the Democrats lose!  They lost in 2010 and thereafter—1200 local seats, 17 governorships, 13 Senate seats, 63 House seats, and finally the Presidency.  

The ordinary folks have risen up against the elites not only because the elites hog all the best jobs, but because they can’t hide their eye-rolling disdain for the mundane middle people.  This has been on display nightly in the Main Stream Media elite commentators.  By 2106, the revolt needed a President.  Every now and then a politician comes along who understands the family and faith people.  Trump, who likes wearing ball caps, went about the campaign, according to Kellyanne Conway, stopping to talk to the waitresses, doormen and security guys while the people in suits and ties waited for him.  We’ve seen pols like this before.  Reagan took his issues from the people “on the mashed potato circuit” where he mixed and spoke in small towns.  Washington was at home on his farm and in his brewery shoveling grain with the slaves he later manumitted.  TR signed up a battalion of cowboys and former friends from the Dakotas called the Rough Riders to fight in the war.  The key seems to be, not the humility of a candidate’s upbringing (like Jonathan Edwards) but of who they like to call friends in adulthood. Every now and again, it takes a populist businessman to reorganize the arrogant bureaucracy, tame the big shot legislators, and bring America back to the values that created it. Welcome home again, America.