Revolt against Elitism

The Trump brand is anti-elitist, and son Donald Junior spoke to reinforce that brand.

Hillary Clinton is an elitist.   She tries to disguise it a little but mostly she embraces it.  In New Hampshire in September I recorded her revised "origin story."   She did not speak of her own log cabin childhood because she did not have one.   She spoke of her mother.  Hillary said her mother's struggle, having been forced to leave the house as a teenager, was "the touchstone" of Hillary's own life of public service.   Hillary said she could have gone to Wall Street after leaving Yale Law School, but instead worked for the Children's Defense Fund.   (And then, later, in Little Rock, worked for the Rose law firm--as elite as it gets in Arkansas.)

Hillary was Wellesley and Yale Law.  She was a lawyer.  She serves on boards, including being the first female director on the Walmart Board.  She vacationed at Martha's Vineyard.  She reads serious newspapers and serious books and knows serious journalists and is comfortable with serious--and seriously wealthy--people.  

Hillary Clinton's instincts and peers are from a culture of educated, successful people--the kind of people who read and comprehend complicated information created by respected institutions.   There is an aristocracy of these talented people and she is in it.   The aristocracy is theoretically open to intelligent and hard working people, primarily through the avenue of education, and the theory is mostly true.  It is open.  Hillary is in it and so could anyone.

(I help coordinate the Harvard admissions interviews in Southern Oregon.  Every year about a dozen wonderful, bright, ambitious young people apply to Harvard.   Admission to Harvard is one of the many gateways into that privilege, but there are lots of others: elite colleges, military academies, extraordinary athletic or technology talent, parental money.  It is way, way easier to get enter this elite body if one starts off with parents in the educated middle or professional class, but it is not essential.)  

 Donald Trump is an anti-elitist.   It is not intuitive that Trump is anti-elitist since he is the product of inherited wealth and he mentions that he went to Wharton--and notes it is Ivy League, a really, really top school, the best--and that he lives in a zone of luxury: top jet, top homes, top casinos, top golf courses, top businesses, top wives all of them 10s when he married them.

Donald Trump, Junior

But Donald Trump communicates a working person's notion of wealth, vulgarity in the old sense of the word:  tasteless, crass, ostentatious, flamboyant, overdone, gaudy, garish, brash, loud.  It is the wealth of a name in capital letters in gold on a casino rather than the wealth of a name on a university library or charitable foundation.

And Trump is openly critical of elites of journalism, of academia, of politicians and political commentators.   He mocks them.

Son Donald Trump, Jr. spoke last night and reaffirmed that brand.  Donald Junior gave an extended and coherent policy explanation of Trumpism.   Donald Junior does what his father does not do: appear like an intelligent, disciplined political leader.  

The current laws do not help regular American.   They help the protected elites.   Don Junior said that his father was working to help every American, not the "crony elites." 

"To this day, many of the top executives in our company are individuals that started out as blue collar . . . . We learned from people who had doctorates in common sense."

Donald Junior criticized the closed system of education which serves the interests of the teachers' unions and the tenured faculty at universities.  The Democratic Party, he said, is under the control of teachers' unions who oppose upward mobility by stifling innovation in order to protect themselves and their jobs. Click here for the 15 minute speech     Readers who find Donald Trump personally offensive but who "sort of like what he says" will hear Trump-populism expressed with credibility and self discipline--a better version of Trump.   

"For the first time parents no longer think their kids will be as well off as we were.  We have lost the confidence in our leaders and the faith in our institutions."    Donald Junior went on to say that his father listens to practical experts valuing their "street smarts and work ethic",  not the people with degrees from Harvard and Wharton with their "paper credentials" with "fancy colleges and degrees."

Donald Junior continues, that his father 'knows that the heart of the American dream is that whoever we are and wherever we're from, we can get ahead."    The flood of immigrants to America stand in the way of jobs and promotions for hard working Americans.

The regulations do not help consumers, he said.  It helps preserve the privilege of billionaires and the "protected people" at the top of  society.

Donald Trump, Senior may lose this election but his son could win it.   He expresses the Sanders viewpoint nearly as well as Bernie.