The Best Analysis Yet of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

This article by Jason Linkins is the best analysis I've yet seen on the recent U.S. presidential elections.

One particularly astonishing, delightful, and even funny, aspect of the article is that is written in the vocabulary and concepts of the “educated” - the very people whom it identifies as the problem. I could barely believe it. Here are all the advanced tools being used to tell the truth, rather than to cover it up.

The “Comments” which follow the article, with a few remarkable exceptions, are not worth reading. I often find that letters to the editor and comments following blog pieces contain contain valuable insights that develop the theme but not so much in this instance.

I recall seeing the video of a young person asking Hillary as she passed if she would consider releasing to the public one of those quarter-of-a-million-dollars speeches she gave to the Vampire Squid. The young person did not use the term “Vampire Squid,” but was very respectful and straight. You could see from the look on Hillary's face that she was bright as could be, that she knew what was being asked. I wonder if she even suspected at that moment, as I did, that it was all over for her now, that she had just been destroyed.

The idea that the educated, the respected, the well-paid, are the problem seems just not to be deeply or widely understood. Such people are often referred to as “the elites” or “the professional class” or “the establishment.” The idea just isn't really believed. I often find while discussing the situation with my neighbors who are “angry” about the situation – say, of knowing that they will never be able to get for themselves or for their children proper dental care or even clothing, never mind education or “security.” They complain, are angry, but they still don't, underneath it all, realize nor believe that the professionals, the doctors, the well-paid, the respectables, are not truly competent. I include the humane qualities in the definition of competency.

I have long, earnest talks with these neighbors, and I see that they may recognize that the local car mechanic or roofer or painter or hair-dresser is an incompetent fake but they just rarely grasp that a well-paid professional is a fake. They still trust the authorities and experts and the “successful.” It's as if they haven't grown up in some way and feel that there is still a parent, a grown-up, who is still there.

Larry Summers comes to mind now as I close. Chief Economist at the World Bank. Secretary of the U. S. Treasury. President of Harvard. Highly-Paid and Extremely wealthy. Much-published. Very bright. Educated. Articulate. Connected. Can argue any point and win. A Democrat. 

My neighbors just can't seem to imagine that it's all waste, and actually turned against us.

I was talking with a house-painter yesterday who has serious medical problems, absolutely no money, and who is an enthusiastic Trump voter and supporter. His view of why he can't get medical care is that medical doctors are not getting paid enough, that all the regulations and Obama and malpractice insurance have made it impossible for medical doctors to make money, and therefore he can't get medical care. The poor doctors don't have enough money – that's his belief – they are in the same predicament he's in.