Donald Trump is cruising to the Republican nomination and possibly the White House because he has captured the new conservative zeitgeist and worked out what voters want, says David Frost in the Telegraph – with a shout out to the Daily Sceptic. Here’s an excerpt.
It’s easy to rail against the elite, but rarer to get actual evidence that they really do think differently from the rest of us. This month we got that, in the form of a Rasmussen poll in America, picked up here by Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic website. This poll specifically looked at the opinions of the elite – defined as people with a postgrad degree, earning $150,000 annually and living in dense cities. That’s about 1% of Americans.
The results are pretty striking. Nearly half of the elite think there is “too much freedom” in America, while only 16% of Americans as a whole think that. 77% support rationing of energy and meat (all Americans: 28%). Well over two thirds would ban gas stoves and petrol cars, and over half would ban non-essential air travel and air conditioning (all Americans: 13% and 25%). 70% of the elite trust the Government, more than twice as many as ordinary Americans. And finally, though hardly surprisingly, while only 40% of Americans approve of President Biden, 84% of the elite do.
Look no further for what has driven Donald Trump to all but tying up the Republican presidential nomination this week. He’s appealing to those many Americans who think that the people in charge of the country just don’t share their aspirations and are not in touch with the realities of their lives.
This poll suggests they aren’t wrong to think that. To outsiders, one of the most baffling features of the past year is the way that Trump became more popular as the number of court cases against him increased. Yet if you see the governing establishment as wholly different from you, motivated by quite different values, you are more likely to see Trump as a genuine victim of that system, and hence as the only real opportunity to change it.
However things play out for Trump in the months to come, and I certainly see him as a distinctly mixed candidate, it’s obvious from his campaign that technocracy is just not a winning proposition on the Right. Instead, the rocket motor comes from anti-system politics, populism if you will, and from fundamentals like immigration control. …
Republicans want someone who is prepared to kick around the bureaucracies, to appeal over their heads to the public, and who doesn’t see it as a killer argument when someone says “well we have always done it like this” or “a court might disagree with you”. Perhaps Republican voters are right to sense that Trump’s very brashness, his indifference to convention, is precisely what may make him able to break the mould and make things happen.
Worth reading in full.
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