Oh, contraire, mi amigo. Trump's return to power was predicated by much more than insults. Both 2016 and 2024 were the culmination of literal generations of pen- up resentment and alienation.
My attempt to explain the release was at post #236 and repeated below:
Re:
the Democratic Party lacks a strong, single-minded populist autocrat who’s willing to exploit the fragile hopes of the desperate and disillusioned.
Here is an applicable term not spoken by Everyman: illiberal populism or as some call it, illiberal democracy. It explains Trump's rise from television celebrity to elected president and his return to power.
The MAGA movement has deep roots. After fifty years I still remember this opening paragraph from C. Wright Mill's
The Power Elite (1959)
The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. ‘Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.
Updating that paragraph to describe the powerlessness of ordinary men and women today, you arrive at a feeling of abandonment by and alienation from liberal democracy and its institutions. Over time the diminishment of cultural identity and social cohesiveness aggravated by too rapid economic changes, and the perceived failure of institutions to equitably balance the effects across classes, makes a bull-in-the-China-shop illiberal populist leader like Trump a natural choice for hopes of change and equalization.
That's my opinion, anyway. And what Democrats should do, also my opinion, is move to the center with problem solving candidates to reclaim the alienated and disaffected.
