The Election of Donald Trump: History Repeating

In The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America, Kevin Phillips shows that the overarching story of the American Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, and the English Civil War is that of “High Church cavalier aristocrats repeatedly losing to dissenting republican entrepreneurs.”   – Richard Brookhiser, New York Times.  

The victories of Donald Trump in America and Brexit in England are the most recent recurrences of the same essential conflict, with the same end result. 

In the case of Trump, nowhere is this more clear than in the superb post-election analysis Revenge of the Forgotten Class by Alec MacGillis in ProPublica, who says “Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were playing with fire when they effectively wrote off white workers in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt” because voters there “had a profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their own lives.”

These T-Shirts capture sentiment:

Men’s Trump calls me American T Shirt XL Black

Men’s Trump calls me American T Shirt 2XL Cranberry