So Bill Clinton said the era of big government was over. George W. Bush promised compassionate conservatism. Barack Obama faced resistance when he sought to put America on a “new foundation.”
In 2014 something changed. My thesis is that the child migration on our southern border and President Obama’s expansion of his executive amnesty to the relatives of minors brought here illegally—despite his repeated insistence that he lacked any such authority—reversed the poles of American politics.
No longer are our debates about government. They are about the nation. Do we have one? What are its interests? Who benefits from it?
This political pole reversal, like its magnetic counterpart, is incredibly disruptive. Both parties experienced populist insurgencies. Neither nominee invokes the Constitution or limited government. The fiercest supporters of Trump are voters who feel abandoned or harmed or scared by the demographic and socioeconomic transformation of America. “The rise of Trumpism in the past year,” writes George H. Nash in The New Criterion, “has laid bare a potentially dangerous chasm in American politics: not so much between the traditional left and right but rather (as someone has put it) between those above and those below on the socio-economic scale.”
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