Voters in Indiana handed Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz his walking papers Tuesday. His decisive defeat at the hands of New York real estate developer Donald Trump left the conservative firebrand beaten, bloodied and bereft of any hope his campaign could keep what is now the acknowledged presumptive GOP nominee from amassing the 1,237 pledged delegates he needs to win on the first ballot.
The people who purport to understand politics are perplexed by Trump’s success. They may have once laughed about the rumor he might have paid people to attend his announcement rally at his eponymously named Manhattan tower, but they laugh no more.
The reason they don’t understand, that they still don’t understand, is that Trump isn’t a political animal. He’s a cultural phenomenon and conservatives, it has been said time and again, don’t get the culture.
SEE: [Editorial Cartoons on the 2016 Presidential Elections]
It’s actually not that hard. The American culture is, like the American people, coarse and unrefined. We are basic in our tastes, our likes and our dislikes. We largely eschew high culture in favor of the easily accessible. We prefer slogans to manifestos. We are a run-and-gun, get-up-and-go kind of people who for too long have felt the responsible institutions of society are trying to put us flat on our backs. Most of all, and this is where Trump has really struck the motherlode, we are sick and tired of the so-called smart set telling us we are wrong about just about everything.
He has tapped into the profound, bubbling, boiling middle-class resentment of elites now directed at both political parties. To put it in a cultural context — which is really the only way to explain it — he’s tapped into the same emotions that draw people to the music of Billy Joel, whose lyrics are tattooed on the souls of members of my generation.
Not his entire oeuvre of course but go ahead, listen to songs like “Allentown,” “Goodnight Saigon,” “Movin’ Out,” “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “The Downeaster ‘Alexa'” and “Miami 2017,” all of which express the profound resentment so many Americans feel at the way their chance to grab a piece of the American dream has been shattered by events beyond their control.
Here’s how Wikipedia — the encyclopedia for the Internet set — describes Allentown:
The song’s theme is of the resolve of those coping with the decline of the American manufacturing industry and the emergence of the rust belt in the latter part of the 20th century. More specifically, it depicts the depressed, blue-collar livelihood of residents of Allentown, Pennsylvania in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s decline and eventual closure.
These are the kinds of emotions and economic realities Trump has tapped into during the campaign. He’s become a tenacious tiger defending the interests of the economically battered. To them, he represents one last chance to be treated fairly, to see the result of their hard work — when they can get it — rewarded instead of denigrated by Wall Street bankers and smarmy union officials and unfeeling corporate leaders and special interest groups pleading for special treatment in order to right some grievance from long ago. These people are the backbone of America. They have been at least since the end of the World War II, and they are unwilling, perhaps even unable to carry the burden any longer under the current cultural and political alignment. They’re just looking for a break — and they think Trump is the one to get it for them.
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Explaining Donald Trump: He’s a Force of Politics, Not Culture originally appeared on usnews.com
