This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.