The Trump insurrection is, like the Tea Party, a Jacksonian rebuke in the spirit of William Buckley’s famous preference to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory over devolving all power on the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty. Common sense is not, today’s Jacksonians believe, a sufficient condition for successfully governing in the modern, complicated world … but it is a necessary one, and also shockingly uncommon in the ranks of our well trained, highly credentialed mandarins.
Demagoguery flourishes when democracy falters. A disreputable, irresponsible figure like Donald Trump gets a hearing when the reputable, responsible people in charge of things turn out to be self-satisfied and self-deluded. The best way to fortify Trump’s presidential campaign is to insist his followers’ grievances are simply illegitimate, bigoted, and ignorant. The best way to defeat it is to argue that their justified demands for competent, serious governance deserve a statesman, not a showman.
Source: The Reason I’m Anti-Anti-Trump