PITTSBURGH — If you wanted to have a keen, dispassionate understanding of how much the Republican Party has changed over the past eight years, all you had to do was stand outside the PPG Paints Arena in the city’s Hill District neighborhood and see the line of people stretched 10 blocks in either direction up Fifth Avenue.
The attendees were young, male and female, and diverse. There were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian people all having a great time, getting to know each other, singing songs in line, swapping stories of where they were from, and almost always finding out they shared a mutual friend.
Inside the arena, one could witness the emergence of a new coalition of Republican voters: union workers, nurses, janitors, businessmen and women, doctors, lawyers, police officers, and college students of every race and generation. They were there because of their support for former President Donald Trump. However, they were there more for their support of each other.
There will never be another candidate for president of the United States like Trump.
For his detractors, that is a relief. However, they should understand that whether Trump wins or loses, these voters are here to stay. They have seen what the power of the cultural curators in our country, in academia, media, Hollywood, institutions, and corporations, and in the bureaucracies has done to their lives, and they have rejected it.
It took someone as brash, unconventional, strong, and cheeky as Trump to be the bull in the china shop they wanted to see upended.
The elites mocked them for too long. The elites tried to change their values and their children’s values. The elite movies insulted them. The elite reporting was biased against them. The universities have lost all credibility, and the corporations have decided to dump their decades of loyalty to satisfy a narrow consumer base.
This will come as a surprise to some, but Trump did not create this coalition. He is the result of it. That is what the people who want the Republican Party to be the party of Dick Cheney again do not understand. Both parties have changed. Republicans are now the party of the working class, and the Democrats are the party of the elite.
When Trump came down that escalator nine years ago, the focus of my profession was on something he said about Mexicans. What journalists missed and every working-class person heard was a speech he gave on the dignity of work. A speech, by the way, that was no different than the speech Bill Clinton gave in 1992 when he announced he was running. But in a pattern that people would see for the next eight years, the speech was delivered unconventionally.
Why did so many like it? Because Democrats and Republicans have been delivering beautiful oratory for decades, and none of those slurpy words made their lives better. None of their words helped their communities, their schools, or their opportunities, that is, unless you had wealth and power.
The emotion was palpable in the arena in Pittsburgh Monday night. People knew they had been part of something they may never see again. They saw the son of arguably the greatest American baseball player of all time, Roberto Clemente, sitting there in the crowd, both men the proud sons of Puerto Rico, giving his support to Trump. They saw Megyn Kelly, once a critic of Trump, give an impassioned speech in support of him. So did former congresswoman and Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.
When it was announced during his speech that podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed him, the place went wild.
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Political affiliations often defy logic. Since the 1930s, the Democrats acted like they owned the working-class voter. Trump’s style upended all of that. Sometimes to his detriment, sometimes to his advantage, this coalition that Brad Todd and I detailed and laid out for everyone to understand in our book, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, has only expanded.
And this coalition will go on. The old Republican Party is not getting back together for the foreseeable future. Coalitions move like tectonic plates — they change ever so slightly. This one has been in the works since 2006.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
