Victor Davis Hanson offers a diagnosis at National Review Online of competing maladies afflicting fevered partisans contemplating President Trump.
Equally explosive is the syndrome in which middle-class moderates and independents are tired of being damned as privileged and biased, on the basis of their appearance — often by those who enjoy far more privilege and exhibit far more bias. For all the hype that the stereotypical Trump voter was uneducated and without a degree, Trump appealed as much to the college educated and professionals for what he at least was not, rather than for what he was. …
… Never Trumpers often feel that Trump’s latest escapades are embarrassingly excused as sophisticated “three-dimensional chess” by Trump supporters. I have rarely found many Trump voters who believed that. More often, they shrug, saying they wish Trump would curb his tweets, rallies, and ad hominem outbursts.
To the extent that they do not object enough to Trump’s behavior, it is not because they believe he is a chess master of political strategy. Rather, they assume that, for strange reasons, no one can quite predict the effects of Trump’s weirdness, in a stifling politically correct society. …
… Did Trump’s ascendance snap Never Trumpers into self-realization that they were not of the same ilk as even his reluctant supporters? Or did their frenzied loathing spark Trump’s voters into seeing that his Republican haters were more interested in the style and class of conservativism than in its message and pragmatic ramifications for the American public?
