Yascha Mounk at his Substack:
After Donald Trump was first elected, the same political scientists who had adamantly insisted that he could never win a presidential election quickly coalesced on the same interpretation of his success. He was an authoritarian populist who cleaved the electorate into “real” Americans and everybody else, promising to put the former in charge while banishing the latter to the margins (or, according to the more extreme alarmists, putting them in camps). On this interpretation, two things were intrinsically linked: Trump’s demagogic talent for mobilizing popular opinion against the norms and values of a deeply mistrusted establishment; and his apparent alliance with a predominantly white and elderly electorate that had experienced a decline in their social status, feared the future, and was ready to resist change by any means necessary.
It turns out that this was a grave analytical error, which made it impossible to understand what has been brewing in the United States for the past ten years. For despite all the predictions that Trump couldn’t possibly win, he didn’t just squeak through in 2016; he also won a more convincing victory, taking the popular vote, in 2024.
More here.
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