No group of Americans has been more misunderstood by the political chattering class than the alliance of Trump voters. Until Donald Trump stepped onto the political stage, this voting bloc didn't exist. Now that it exists, it will not go away. A quiet revolution has occurred in America.
For too many decades, the political parties have carved up Americans into separate and often vying camps based on region, race, and class, while never articulating a message that unified Americans as one. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, politicians have largely discarded the lofty battle between American individual freedom and socialist state control. They have cynically used American patriotism to hold foreign battlefields while decrying patriotism as unhealthy and xenophobic at home. They have played up Americans' differences and distorted their common history until Americans became strangers to one another.
Every election since the Cold War has been about "change," but "change" has proven to be a cheap principle. Free trade politicians pushed NAFTA as a way to discourage illegal immigration by increasing wages south of the border but managed only to destroy millions of American manufacturing jobs while doing nothing to slow down unlawful border crossings. Washington politicians elevated Communist China to the world's chief manufacturer with the promise that international trade would subdue the dictatorship's human rights abuses and hostilities toward its neighbors; instead, only Wall Street has profited, while China commits ethnic genocide on a scale not seen since WWII and parlays American investment dollars into territorial expansion that threatens global peace.
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