Election: Conservatives on Why Trump Won

Trump won because people unhappy with both candidates voted for change.  Here, from conservative commentators, are other reasons for Trump’s triumph.


Intolerance of Elite Rule

From William McGurn, Wall Street Journal:

liberals come across as intolerant of ordinary Americans today [with] their preference for court decisions and regulatory mandates over democratically debated and approved legislation. This preference for working around the people’s elected representatives feeds all-or-nothing outcomes that are devoid of the accommodations and compromises which almost always feature in any legislative solution.

Comment: Progressives are better than us; “father knows best.”  Why should our betters compromise?  Maybe because lesser folks vote too.


Disgust with Identity Politics

From Monica Crowley, Washington Times:

The left’s multidecade grand plan — to change the very nature of the country by moving it toward European-style socialism — reached its pinnacle with Obama. And yet, those statist policies are — paradoxically — greatly responsible for Donald Trump’s win.

Obama had three main goals: to expand government as fast and as widely as possible; the ultimate objective of that was to expand the number of people dependent of government as fast and as widely as possible; and the ultimate objective of that was to leverage it into a permanent Democratic voting majority.

To achieve those goals, he chose to pit Americans against each other in order to make it easier to slide in his radical redistributionist agenda. He divided us by class, gender, race and age. He turned the American motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”) upside down and into “Out of One, Many.” The American experiment could not go on as it once did if it were driven by divisions and envy rather than uniting values and common goals.

Comment: Clinton, following Obama, played identity politics for all it was worth.  Why? Because she had nothing else to run on — Obama’s economy isn’t working. The irony is our credentialed “betters” don’t deliver prosperity for the middle and working classes.


Trumping the “Race Card”

From Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal:

most liberals and their friends in the media continue to view Trump’s victory through a self-serving racial lens. Today, race is the Democratic Party’s organizing principle. Group identity is a doctrine and group grievances are to be nurtured and exploited politically no matter the damage to civil discourse.

Comment: Riley, who is black, doesn’t like the way Democrats’ focus on race affects our “civil discourse.”  OK, but Riley errs in his use of the word “today” in his sentence, “Today, race is the Democratic Party’s organizing principle.”

Since Vice President (1825-32) John C. Calhoun’s time, Democrats have used race as an “organizing principle,” first to hold the South, then after the 1960s civil rights struggle, to gain the rest of the country.  While the racial hostility target has shifted 180 degrees from blacks to “rednecks,” “Yahoos,” and “white supremacists,” the organizing principle remains the same: win through demonizing a race, not by fixing the economy.

The Democrats’ effort backfired in 2016, when fed-up whites in key northern states got behind Trump.