Mr Trump's Supporters

TRIGGER WARNINGS:  It may turn out you are a Normal.

For John, BLUF:  As President Abe Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Militant Normals:  How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy
Author:  Kurt Schlichter
Kindle Version:  288 Pages
Publisher:  Center Street
Language:  English
ASIN:  B07B8G25M3
Publication Date:  2 October 2018

The Author divides Americans into two groups, the Elite and the Normals.  In his telling, the Elite are a self-selected group that thinks it should run the Country, and often do.  The Elite includes politicians, bureaucrats, academics, media and experts of various kinds.  The normals are pretty much everyone else.  They are people focused on family, work and religion.

In Mr Schlichter's telling of the story, the Elites want to run things and shape society in certain ways.  The Normals don't much care what the Elites are about, as long as they keep to "The Bargain".  The Bargain is that the Elites keep the Government running tolerably well and allow the Normals to carry on without undue interference.

In the Author's mind the Elites, who have lost touch with the Normals, have not been holding up their end of The Bargain.  He traces this back to the 1960s, when the new Elite began replacing the older Elite, an Elite who understood the Normals, and had many of the same values as the Normals.  Today's Elites are beaming off in a different direction from the Normals and the Normals recognize this.

The Normals wouldn't care about this path divergence, except they have begun to think the Elites are not holding up their end of The Bargain.  The first big sign of this was the Tea Parties.  The next big sign was the 2016 campaign of Mr Donald Trump.  In Mr Schlichter's telling of the story it wasn't so much that Mr Trump picked his voters as they were waiting for him and adopted him.

The book is about how we got to where we are and the fact that the Elites have to recognize this situation or they will find themselves cast aside, to be replaced by a new political elite, one more in tune with the Normals, who will then go back to letting the Elites decide things, until that Elite goes off the beam.

Regards  —  Cliff