Clueless Elites and Mainstream Media Shocked by 2024 Election Results
For those who read my Monday essay predicting Donald Trump’s epic win, the only thing less surprising than his triumph was the media’s surprise it happened.
With a few exceptions, our self-appointed national elites remain utterly clueless about the nature of the nation they purport to lead.
They think Americans are happy with an economy that downgrades work with your hands and overcompensates work with your mind.
They think Americans want more dissolution of traditional norms, and the faster those are destroyed the better.
They think Americans want to care more about suffering people overseas than hard-pressed people at home.
They think Americans are as obsessed with race and gender as they are, and America is a place that represses diversity rather than one that celebrates and enables it.
They are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Truth self-evident . . .
The Americans who voted for Trump don’t see his victory as the end of American democracy; they see the perpetuation of the elite dominance of the country’s cultural and economic lives as the repudiation of it.
What part of “all men are created equal” don’t the elite understand?
The American people know this promise is both “self-evident” and the beating heart of American life.
The American people know this promise is real, today, even if it remains imperfectly applied (we are fallible human beings, after all).
The American people want what Americans have always wanted: a government strong enough to remove burdens they can’t remove themselves and then get the heck out of the way.
American politics for decades after they left office.
New American dream
Trump and his vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, have the opportunity to usher in a fifth Great Realignment, one that will take the new Republican plurality among voters — the first since 1932! — and make it a new American majority.
The renewal of the American dream.
The restoration of American power.
The repairing of our national divide.
All of this is possible now because the American people kept the faith with America and rejected the siren song of pedigreed aristocrats on Wall Street, in ivory towers, Hollywood and the legacy media.
Freedom.
Responsibility.
Equality.
Opportunity.
What a wonderful time to be alive in the greatest country in the world.
Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
