Militant Normals

In this book, Kurt Schlichter explains how it is that an outsider like Donald Trump was able to harness the frustration of normal Americans into an electoral victory over the elites of both parties.  Mostly, normal Americans - apolitical folks of middling to low education - have been content to live their lives with only occasional concern for what is happening in Washington DC.  This worked well enough for most of the 20th century.  After all, the elites had won WWII and put a man on the moon.  The economy was mostly great from the post-war period until the 2008 crash.  However, there was a growing rift between the elites and the normals.  The elites, who have always looked down on the normals, became a lot more open in their disdain.  Hillary's 'deplorables' comment is the most noteworthy but there are many others.  Then there is the two-tier justice system.  Crimes by the elites are not treated the same as crimes by the normals.  Much of this was tolerable when the elites actually did a competent job of governing but the repeated unwinnable wars, unchecked illegal immigration that neither party took seriously, and nearly 2 decades of a stagnating economy riled them.  First, they responded with the TEA Party movement and were trashed and defamed by both parties.  Donald Trump, a man who spent most of his life among the elites, tapped into the unrest among the normals and rode it to the Republican nomination and the presidency.

 

The best part of the book was his ripping into Conservative Inc., the voices of conservatism who have spent decades writing about policies and ideas that are never enacted, even when Republicans have been in office.  Amazingly, most of Conservative Inc. became the Never Trump movement, despite the fact that Trump has enacted many of the policies that these very writers and pundits have promoted for decades.  Looking only at the judges who have been appointed, conservatives should be ecstatic for the Trump Presidency but they are not.  Schlichter posits that they are elites first and conservatives second.

 

The book is an easy read and highly-relatable.  Though a retired colonel, trial lawyer, and syndicated columnist, he writes more like a guy ranting at the dinner table than a professor lecturing the unlearned.  There is no mincing of words.  Great stuff.