Dancing Around the Real Issue

Owen is a very reliable guy who knows near-all the Wisconsin players.  So his brief summary of the current 'conservative' split is--given its brevity--solid stuff.

But he doesn't address the 600-lb. canary:  populism.

It should be pretty clear that I despise Trump, who is not much more than an opportunist who understands McLuhan better than anyone of the 'Conventional' political class.  It should also be clear that I would choose the SMOD over Clinton.

Ugh.

But what has really gotten traction for Trump is his populism--something that Conventional Conservatives and the (D) Party have totally abandoned in the last decade or so.  (We should be clear:  the (D) Party pays a lot of lip-service to populism, but they don't really give a damn--for them, claiming to be populist is simply a path to complete power.  And true to (D) principles, they pervert the meaning of the term, anyway, making it into a giveaway scheme.)

This populist strain in the Trump campaign, however,  has the Conventional Conservatives spitting mad--so much so that they have applied every epithet in the dictionary to "populism".  It may as well be the Black Death.

This is where Conventional Conservatives get it wrong, as 16 of them learned to their chagrin.

There is NOTHING WRONG with defending the border, something that Conventional Conservatives have deliberately failed to rectify.  There is NOTHING WRONG with limiting--or eliminating--cheap-labor 'professional' (I.T.) entry to this country, similarly deliberately frustrated by Conventional Conservatives.  There is NOTHING WRONG with US citizens earning more for their labor than citizens of other countries.  There is NOTHING WRONG with FAIR trade, which Conventional Conservatives have derided and (again) frustrated with "arguments" from Wally-World Econ 101.  (In that regard, there is NOTHING WRONG with politics governing economics for the benefit of the polity rather than the Chamber of Commerce.  Granted, there are limits--but those limits apply to BOTH sides of the equation).

And that's just the politics.  We could get into the higher matters, such as morals, where Conventional Conservatives have played both sides to the middle for 30+ years, or fabricated 'crises' such as man-made 'warming/cooling', again played to benefit Conventional Conservative funding-sources but not the Polity.  We could get into the Perpetual War disaster which has the backing of the Conventional Conservatives, too....)

If Conservatives want a following, they damn well better figure out who is voting, and why.  Here's a clue:  Ron Reagan did NOT win with just (R) voters.  Neither did Trump.

UPDATE:  Here's a closely-related post from Erickson on Limbaugh.  Yes, it's related.  Just read the damn thing.