The Insider Election

One way to think about Donald Trump’s victory

American politics — indeed, the politics of the entire Western world — continues to be shaped by the dynamics of inside versus outside. Last week’s election results are the latest example.

A standard interpretation of the last decade is that Donald Trump and his supporters are a movement of outsiders, an invasive force pushing their way into the sanctum sanctorum of the American political establishment. To some extent that is true, and Trump himself has exploited his supposed “outsider” status. But there is another frame, arguably more relevant to the current moment. Most of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters do not think of themselves as revolutionaries. They do not see themselves as a break with the mainstream of the American political tradition; rather, they are the latest expression of it. They see themselves as dedicated to a uniquely American way of life, and they are instinctively hostile to those who wish to upset it. They favor the normal over the novel, the customary over the radical, and the familiar over the foreign. They see themselves as patriots, and they think the average American is a patriot, too. They are “inside,” as defenders of the castle are inside.