The President of the People, Not the Political Elite
By Olivia Jaber
After close to four years of relentless analysis, explanations, and excuses, the liberal elites are no closer to understanding why they lost to President Donald Trump in 2016. While the Republican party keeps a refreshing “stick-it-to-the-man” mentality, the Democratic party continues to cozy up to its establishment. A 47-year veteran of Capitol Hill, “Middle-class” Joe, who ironically, couldn’t care less about the working class if he tried, is as establishment as you can get. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the average American is tired of the preaching from out-of-touch career politicians and hypocritical lectures from movie stars and athletes. The average American refutes socialist policies and has bigger fish to fry than pronouns and gender identity.
In short, the average American is not interested in the Left’s increasingly radical agenda. That has a lot to do with the fact that the Left’s agenda overwhelmingly focuses on coastal issues and is primarily dictated by a group of political, cultural, and financial elites. People who can afford to care about mandating electric vehicles and banning fracking. Apart from the uber-progressive fringes of the far-Left, elitism is the current Motus Operandi of the Democratic Party. While the political elite might be indifferent to the needs of working-class, rural Americans, President Trump is not. The President has allowed the people of this country to have their voices heard after being sidelined and misunderstood for so long. Yet the question has to be made: how did a billionaire from New York harness the vote, confidence, and continued support of the working class and rural America? It’s simple: he cared about the average Americans that the Left ignored.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was unable to secure the Presidential nomination in large part due to her cluelessness regarding the “class dynamics driving American politics.” Clinton was a member of a political class that deepened the pockets of bankers, financiers, and big corporations at the American worker’s expense. While President Trump is, and was, a billionaire when he ran in 2016, he was arguably not a member of the elites. Michael Bloomberg notably called the President an “outcast” among the elites of New York. It is with this rejection that President Trump finds common ground with blue-collar workers. Just like the elites cast aside rural America, so too did they cast away Donald Trump. On the other hand, Hillary was a former first lady, a Senator, and the anointed successor to the Obama Presidency. She represented “the epitome of the no-class girl, became a lawyer, professional technocrat, all the things that this working-class culture is very suspicious of.”
With Hillary’s position as a member of the elite came a misunderstanding, or perhaps, ignorance of issues not directly pertaining to the base of the Democratic Party. Compared to Trump, who spoke directly to the American worker in the rust belt and rural areas, Clinton’s campaign strategy and policy positions seemed cocooned by coastal priorities.
As Victor Davis Hanson commented in 2015, “high profile progressives are largely rich, and their relatively small numbers live in a gentrified cocoon.” Moreover, their “out-of-touch privilege” has resulted in “agenda-radical green politics, hyper-feminism, transgender advocacy, forced multiculturalism, open borders— that were not principal concerns of the struggling working classes.” Think about it— “A techie in Silicon Valley, an actor in Hollywood, a trial lawyer in Washington, or a professor at Yale had the income to afford the steeper taxes and higher housing, energy, and college costs that were the natural dividends of their own political agendas.” Liberal elites live in their own bubbles and “[have] little clue how the ramifications of their own unworkable ideology always [fall] on distant others.” The moral of the story is this— Hillary Clinton, Al Sharpton, and techies in Silicon Valley preach inequality and unfairness, demanding regulations and high taxes, but never show “symbolic class solidarity by now and then flying commercial, eschewing limousines, and avoiding Martha’s Vineyard.” In layman’s terms, the Left is out of touch. They don’t understand the needs of rural America, and their understanding of the needs of the average American is hazy at best. However, the Left doesn’t just seem content to not care about middle America; in some cases, they actively loathe them.
These middle Americans are the people that Hillary Clinton flew over while campaigning, the people the media loves to bash as “deplorable” and the people who Joe Biden hides from. Backward idiots, rednecks, rubes, racists, dropouts, and uneducated are just some of the names used to describe middle America by our politicians and media. Obama called them “people who cling to their guns and religion.” The same liberals who mock people of faith for “ignorantly” believing in a religion don’t seem to see that they [the liberal] follow their own quasi-religious doctrine. However, unlike the Christian who prays at the altar of a church, the liberal prays at the altar of the party. While ordinary Americans go to church, reject self-righteous etiquette, and practice patriotism, coastal elites spew identity politics, display double standards, and vilify the very country that allowed their success in the first place. Middle America sees this country for what it is: a beautiful testament to the spirit of the American people. Average Americans are proud patriots; they fly flags in their yards and celebrate the Fourth of July. They love their country, believe in the ideals of the Constitution, and in the reality of the American dream. These aren’t backward ideas, as the Left would say. They’re not symptoms of some “inability to critique your own country,” they’re symptoms of appreciation and gratitude.
So between the hypocrisy, disdain, ignorance, and general misunderstanding in 2016, it would be hard to imagine the democrats making the same mistake twice, right? No. While the situation around the election has changed due to COVID-19 and an economic crisis, the Left continues to peddle its demagoguery.
Aside from the obvious unreliability of the leaders of the Democratic party, their inability to advocate for the working class when it comes to policy alienates them from the average American. Democratic leaders champion “full term abortion, open borders, disrespect of law enforcement and the military, high taxes, political correctness, and identity politics.” The extreme positions that the party has chosen to run on do not captivate or interest the average American— they further isolate them. Today, the Republicans are the party for “Real America,” and the Democrats “have become the party of snobbery.” Just look at labor unions, which used to be automatic Democratic strongholds. Union members, especially in the Midwest, chose Trump in 2016 and will likely do so again in 2020. Union members don’t respond well to Biden’s record, “such as his past support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” While union officials endorse Biden, many members observe that the “blue-collar, working-class Democratic Party that my dad or mom was in… it’s morphed into something different.” Because liberal elites “stay in their large cities surrounded by groupthink and convinced of their own righteousness,” they “presume the worst about those who dissent from progressivism and makes it easy for them to rail on the unfairness of a system that requires connecting to voters in flyover country.” Moreover, they can avoid catering to the needs of Republicans— a partisan luxury Republicans are rarely afforded.
President Trump has begun “reshap[ing] the Republican party into a middle-class coalition of all races, deliberately pitted against the boutique leftist rich people in Hollywood, Wall Street, the New York and Washington media, Silicon Valley, and the Washington swamp. Trump boasts far more about lowering minority unemployment than reducing the capital-gains tax, more about reducing drug sentences than the need for unfettered global trade.” In fact, “The Washington Post-ABC News survey,” released in 2017, “found that a majority of the public thinks the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of average Americans in the United States. More Americans think Democrats are out of touch than believe the same of the Republican Party or President Trump.” Trump’s message has been incredibly clear since he rode down the escalator in 2015. He correctly understood that working Americans were fearful of losing their jobs to overseas workers and campaigned against the Obama Trans-Pacific Partnership and NAFTA, and supported the building of a border wall. Clinton dismissed Trump’s charges as “isolationist.” But, Trump was right. In a way, his bold populist policies are even shifting formerly neoliberal Democratic trade policies to the right.
Another factor helping Trump is his clear messaging on the stock market and tax cuts on every tax tranche in the United States. One of the primary critiques of the Obama administration— his financial policies- was a primary catalyst between the Democratic disconnect between elites and average Americans. Matt Stoller, a fellow with the Open Markets Program, noted that Obama’s policy agenda concentrated power in the hands of corporate elites at the expense of less wealthy Americans.” This makes perfect sense, and this frustration first manifested itself in the “Occupy Wallstreet Movement,” and later in the Sanders campaign. In a way, Senator Sander’s populist, albeit progressive support, is just the other side of the energy that brought Trump to office. President Trump has continued to put the average American first, initiating tax cuts for everyday Americans, while the Democratic party continues to embrace corporate interests. Though President Trump’s approval rating hovers around 46 percent, Trump “connects better with many people than Democrats can. He translates well into areas of the country Democrats must win— areas filled with people Democrats seem to hold in contempt.”
Trump’s populist, “America First,” message resonated with the working class and shocked our cultural elites. The same elites who propose an environmental policy that would wipe out millions of jobs in the energy sector, work for consulting firms that send our manufacturing jobs overseas, and profit off tech companies that have demolished our main streets and social fabric. The elites choose to believe fiction over facts and create a divisive culture in the name of “moral superiority.” The elitist Democratic party no longer serves and represents the average American. From their policies that prolong poverty rather than reduce it, to their intolerance of diversity of opinion, to the way their policies make life in their states unaffordable to working people, to the utter disregard for the crime and homelessness that plague their cities. By rejecting half of Americans as deplorables, how can they be considered the party of the people?
In a way, the clearest difference between Trump, Clinton, and Biden, and the way they connect or don’t connect with people is in the way they campaign. While CNN is quick to condemn Trump’s rallies, he has them precisely because the Left doesn’t. The Left doesn’t go to Tulsa; they don’t go to Birmingham or Little Rock. While the Left is busy crowd-testing every slogan and carefully tracing every move and speech, Trump is on the ground winging speeches and showing people that he cares— that he’s one of them. It’s one thing to spend millions of dollars campaigning on ads in a state. It’s an entirely different thing for a candidate to spend tens of hours of their time campaigning in a state. Prior to his unfortunate COVID-19 diagnosis, Trump was on the ground every day, rooting for, connecting with, and leading the average American. The billionaire from New York who lives in a skyscraper with his name on it connects better with average Americans because he cares and because he’s himself. He’s not some politician. He’s just a man with conviction trying to make his dreams a reality.
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