But as much as political insiders and establishment leaders should have been a more savvy about the potential of a populist celebrity billionaire to throw a grenade into a presidential campaign, it was entirely reasonable for many conservative movement leaders to be shocked that a man like Trump could capture the imagination of their movement so quickly, and without any serious commitment to their cause. After all, the last we heard, the Tea Party was still running the congressional asylum. Those folks may have a flair for the dramatic, but they’re true believers in the conservative movement. There was every reason to believe that the millions of Republican voters who supported them were too.
What conservatives found out was that all those years of carefully and patiently educating their voters in the nuances of small government, traditional values and strong national defense, to the point where they could elicit ecstatic cheers by merely uttering the words “tort reform” or “eminent domain” turned out to be for naught. The voters really only heard the dog-whistles. [...]
The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America. [...]
In other words, this isn’t new. The only thing that’s changed is that the people Real Americans resent — African-Americans, women, recent immigrants and LGBT folks — are now assuming positions of prominence and power, and the provincial anger, stoked for so long by the Republican Party, has finally boiled over. Donald Trump is telling those folks what they’ve been wanting to hear, exactly the way they’ve been wanting to hear it for a very long time.
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