The National Interest: Michael Lind: The Neocons Are Responsible For Trumpism

The National Interest: Opinion- Michael Lind- The Neocons Are Responsible for Trumpism

What is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump I don't think can be explained so simplistically as "blame it on the Neoconservatives." There are a lot of things like the facts that we do have a shrinking Caucasian working class in America in the South, Midwest and Northeast. The Caucasian-American working class is much smaller today that it was even ten years ago and is only going to get smaller. Most of the country hasn't seen their wages go up in the last fifteen years. These are the millions of Americans that Pat Buchanan was able to speak to in the 1990s and early 2000s. That Rick Santorum was able to speak to in 2012 and to a certain extent Donald Trump now. Millions of Americans who no longer see the America that they grew up which wasn't nearly as diverse in the 1960s and 70s as it is today.

We now have an African-American President of the United States. We could very well have our first female President of the United States next year if Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016. Homosexuality is not just accepted in America but gays can now get married everywhere in America. We've always been a diverse country ethnically and racially, but now those things are celebrated to the point where our two young adult generations my Generation X and the Millennial's, don't judge people by ace at all. Which is why things like affirmative action has lost so much political support and in danger of being thrown out by the courts. This is simply not the country that Richard Nixon's so-called Silent Majority grew up with where it wasn't just men that basically ran the country, but predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant men from the Northeast and the South.

Those Tea Party rallies from 2009 all the way to 2012, when they said they were going to "take back America", that is what they were speaking about. Take back America from people who've made America so much more diverse and tolerant. When Donald Trump says, "we're going to make America great again", I at least believe he's speaking to the Silent Majority and is saying that he wants to make America great again for them. The Caucasian American working class of Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian, Anglo and other Americans of European background. He's not saying make America great for everybody, but for the Silent Majority that he believes have been left behind. Even though this man has nothing in common with these people from an economic, cultural, political or religious background. He sees a huge political opportunity here for himself that he's exploiting.