You probably couldn’t count on on both hands and both feet the number of mainstream media stories coming out every fifteen minutes trying to explain why Donald Trump stubbornly remains at the top of the polls in the GOP primary and, to a lesser extent, how Bernie Sanders is drawing such mammoth crowds around the country when Hillary was supposed to be handed the nomination on a silver platter. I’ve wrestled with the issue myself here in the past, but today I ran across a somewhat different perspective which might help clear up the mystery. Once again the trick seems to be to stop asking ourselves what is so unique about Trump or Sanders and begin tackling the more difficult question of what is not unique about all the other cookie cutter candidates.

Enter Professor Reynolds, who uses his typical flare in a USA Today editorial to explain that voters on both sides of the aisle have long since been left behind by politicians who go into an election thinking they know what they want, but aren’t really listening.

Trump’s rise is, like that of his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders, a sign that a large number of voters don’t feel represented by more mainstream politicians. On many issues, ranging from immigration reform, which many critics view as tantamount to open borders, to bailouts for bankers, the Republican and Democratic establishments agree, while a large number (quite possibly a majority) of Americans across the political spectrum feel otherwise. But when no “respectable” figure will push these views, then less-respectable figures such as Trump or Sanders (a lifelong socialist who once wrote that women dream of gang rape, and that cervical cancer results from too few orgasms) will arise to fill the need.

But Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation

Instapundit is making some points here which should have been obvious (and probably already were to many of you) but phrasing them in a far more digestible way. We tend to think of the two parties – Democrats and Republicans – as well as the competing ideologies of liberalism and conservatism in terms of their glaring differences. But those differences mostly come down to the ten thousand foot level talking points of policy rather than the unpleasant details where the rubber hits the road for most citizens. When you get down to it, the people running the show in both politics and the media are so comfortable in their positions that the ignorant, unpolished views (as Glenn puts it) of the masses are more of a distraction than a reason to modify your platform.

This leaves too many people sitting around their tables feeling like orphans. As regular conservative readers of this site remind us on a daily (or minute by minute) basis, establishment candidates such as Mitt Romney were never really carrying the battle standard and hearing the solutions being offered by those they sought to represent. And while it may be a more foreign concept to some of us, it’s not difficult to imagine that the same thing is taking place on the Left side of the street. There are probably highly energetic liberals out there who want their leaders to take the bull by the horns and put out a bounty on the Wall Street fat cats, tear down the borders or do whatever else it is that motivates them. Instead, they get Hillary Clinton shoved into their laps, with an agenda which seems to enforce that status quo just as badly as her husband’s triangulating ways.

Perhaps neither Trump nor Sanders is precisely what their supporters may have wanted when the season began heating up, but apparently a lot of them wanted something different. At a bare minimum, they wanted someone who had been listening to the rumbles in the jungle and would reflect the simmering resentment they felt towards the upper crust of the political pie. Seems they have found a match on each side. I’m guessing that the “normal” candidates might find a clue in there as to how they could capture the old magic once again. But on the other hand…

Maybe Trump vs Sanders would be the battle of the Titans everyone is waiting for. What the heck… if we’re going to burn the joint down anyway we might has well have some fun while we do it.