“….Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its own sermonizing.
In particular, the current conundrum and prognostications ignore several constants.
The Democrats failed to see that class-based populism is a far more inclusionary and thus dynamic phenomenon than is racial tribalism—for both whites and non-whites.
Democrats are finally worrying that they have lost the white working class; they should be even more terrified that they might lose 40 percent of the traditional minority vote if the economy keeps growing and Trump keeps talking about protecting low wage-earners from the dual threats of globalization and illegal immigration.
In sum, the Democratic Party has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It is doubling down on exactly what lost it the Blue Wall.
Ditto the Republican Never Trump establishment that seeks to recapture relevance by reemphasizing exactly what lost it influence in 2016. The argument that Trump, the man, is so beyond moral redemption that Trump’s agenda is irrelevant will not fly with those who feel that they are already better off than in 2016. And the idea that conservative populism is a temporary deviation from a winning and properly orthodox Jeb Bush conservatism is delusional….” The Anti-Trump Bourbons: Learning and Forgetting Nothing in Time for 2020