Top Dog

Observing the enthusiasm

Republican candidates for president--led by Trump but echoed by others--are angry and resentful over changes happening in America.   Marco Rubio speaks of the last 7 years as being a downward spiral of increasing misery, and audiences believe it and cheer.   

The past seven years have been a decline???   Things have gotten worse???

How can that be?    Seven years ago we were in a crisis of bankruptcies, foreclosures, massive layoffs, and economic collapse.   The largest banks (Citi and Bank of America), the largest investment firms (Goldman and Morgan Stanley), the largest insurance companies (AIG) and the largest industrial conglomerate (GE), and the largest industrial firms (General Motors and Chrysler) required emergency support.   It was a disaster back then.

Yet supposedly things are worse now, with unemployment down below 5% and home prices back up enough that homeowners have equity once again???

Who could possibly believe that?     Answer:  Lots of people.   They are responding to a decline in something other than the objective economy and health of America.  They are responding to their rising sense of resentment and anger over changes in the social fabric of America and America's place in the world.    

And that generalized resentment has a voice: conservative political/media complex of talk radio, and Fox News, plus the large audience receptive to it.  I saw and heard myself up close in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada

Donald Trump found it, speaks to it, and amplifies it.

Many Americans feel pressured and displaced by changes taking place which reduce the privilege and status of previous winners in the traditional social order.   It used to be an understood "given" that to be white, male, Christian, heterosexual, native born, married, and healthy were positions of honor and deference.  Such people were "normal".  But now, thanks to social and legal changes, plus the burden of "political correctness", the handicapped get special door knobs, crosses get removed from public parks, Christian prayers aren't said at schools, gays get wedding cakes, women get hired as managers, and phone menus require one to "push one for English."    

And post WW2 America was the sole standing industrial nation.  Now we are first among many, a decline in status.  Obama says we are "exceptional", but says that others think they are exceptional.   "First among many" is a much different--worse--thing than "the very, very best, the City on the Hill, top dog period!"

Thus the call to "take America back", because the old America is disappearing.   Demographic and social changes have made America less white, the workforce less male, etc. and the legal landscape has made it necessary to watch ones language.   Political correctness:  a guy can't say bitch, chink, colored, fag, queer, or retard.  One can never tell when someone might get all upset because you assumed the woman in the hospital was a nurse not the doctor.  

There are events in the news that reinforce the point.   

   ***the woman killed by an immigrant here illegally in San Francisco, a sanctuary city

   ***neighbors who saw the San Bernardino shooters "putting things" into a garage but who didn't feel comfortable reporting it as suspicious

   ***shootings in Paris, assaults in Germany, riots in Baltimore

   ***instances of taxpayer support for the undeserving rich (banks and car companies) and the undeserving poor (lazy native born and immigrants)

Trump and Fox and talk radio understand their audience's feeling of anger, frustration, and resentment.   They "get" their audience.   

Lots of Americans (including ones who won't admit it) are in fact made nervous by Muslims in public transportation, especially airplanes.  They resent the fact that they aren't supposed to say anything.   They want TSA person to give them an extra dose, or two, or three of inspection, and doesn't want any nitpicker objecting to it.  

The thing that has gone deeply "wrong" in the last 7 years is growing resentment over social changes, over not being able to voice them openly, and the belief that the president is accelerating those changes rather than resisting them.   And Obama has in fact accelerated them.   And so has Hillary.   Obama supported TARP, allows sanctuary cities, urges police to be color blind in profiling, supports women equality in the workplace, etc.   Obama is a liberal progressive.   And he's half-black.   Obama thinks that respect and empowerment of the variety of people in America is a good thing, that the old traditional social order embodied prejudice, a bad thing.    Obama thinks that speaking respectfully of Muslims is a good thing generally and a necessity for our foreign policy.   

Republican primary voters and Fox and Trump understand Obama.  He is on the side of the side of political correctness.   They aren't.

Trump's policies are undefined but his goals are clear:  assert American nationalism and assert the interests of traditional Americans against the usurping elites of the corrupting rich who buy favors and the undeserving poor and foreigners who are a financial burden and security risk.    

Politicians who think it is about policy are missing the big wave:  Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and John Kasich talk about bipartisanship and governance and they are underperforming what the political cognoscenti think is their due.   The solution isn't policy because the problem is not policy.   The problem is resentment over lost honor.

Trump was politically smart to boycott the Fox debate.   His honor was tweaked by Megan Kelly and Fox.   He considered himself dissed.  He wouldn't have it.  

 HIs critics observe that the slight was petty and it was personal.   Yes, it was petty--that is the point.  Trump demonstrated that he is capricious and unpredictable.  He sent a message that ANYONE messing with his honor creates a risk.  Fox learned a lesson and so did Mexico, China, Putin, and Hillary Clinton.  You cannot tell what might set him off.   Better give him wide berth.  Trump won't be dissed.    If you didn't know before, now you do.

For Americans looking for a leader who will re-assert the honor and status of people feeling diminished by multiculturalism, the United Nations, by international trade agreements, by having to pretend they aren't made nervous by Muslims sitting in the airplane, by people resentful of having to watch their language when describing protected classes of people  then Trump speaks to them and for them.

Which is why Trump is a very formidable political voice in America.