The Madness of Crowds

The Americans who've suffered at the hands of Wall Street, and two long, ineffectual wars, are angry, and they're going to make those responsible pay for it — by voting for Donald Trump.

The big political question in 2016 is: Why are voters so angry? So angry that primary voters in the United States have selected an unqualified, bullying, factually challenged blowhard as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. So angry that British citizens voted to take a blind leap in the dark (aka Brexit), a move so rash that its leading advocates — such as former London Mayor Boris Johnson and former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage — initially fled from the consequences of their own actions. So angry millions of Democrats flocked to the quixotic campaign of Bernie Sanders, and so angry that right-wing extremists may still gain power in Austria, France, and possibly elsewhere.

There are plenty of obvious reasons for this resurgent populism — beginning with the declining economic fortunes of the middle class — but let me suggest another possibility. Could it be that voters around the world — and especially here in the United States — are simply fed up with a political class that repeatedly engages in self-serving misconduct yet walks away unscathed, leaving others to pay the price of their mistakes?...

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