June 01, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Deep down, everybody more or less knows that the current conventional wisdom is genteel flapdoodle, and thus they project their fears and hopes onto Trump. Everyone is vaguely aware in this eighth year of the Obama administration that the dominant goodthink is ludicrously out of sync with reality. Thus, there is an endless supply of “hatestats” that they worry/wish Trump could, at any moment, let slip.
For example, it appears to be widely assumed that Trump, like the little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, could blurt out that, say, the reason blacks get in trouble with the police so much is because they murder people at seven to eight times the rate of whites. Or Trump could mention the highly relevant fact that Jews, despite being only one-fiftieth of the population, make up one-third or more of the Forbes 400.
In reality, though, Trump’s general worldview appears to be that of a typical New Yorker, only minus the ostentatious virtue signaling. Note that Trump had failed to win a majority in any primary until April 19 in his home state, when his 60.4 percent of the vote among those who know him best in mighty New York validated Trump with Republicans nationwide.
The fact that Trump is offering a less filtered version of how a typical New York City voter views the universe is probably a good thing. New Yorkers tend to be clever and self-interested (or they couldn”t afford to live in New York), and thus it’s well worth studying what they do (rather than what they say, which is of course usually hypocritical and intentionally misleading).
After a brief, disastrous dalliance with self-inflicted liberalism, New York City has rebuilt itself through hardheaded policies such as Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk program of patting down black and Latino youths. Even the archprogressive current mayor, Bill de Blasio, felt compelled to reinstall as police chief Giuliani’s idea man Bill Bratton.
Although the Democrats have won New York State in every presidential election going back to 1988, New York City voters are more pragmatic when it comes to their home, because they live there. Thus, the Democrats have triumphed in only one of the last six mayoral elections in New York City.
Trump is applying the broader lessons taught by the successful crime-fighting New York mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg to the national stage.
