Recommended: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them.

Joshua Mitchell had a good piece in Politico yesterday: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them. Since the establishment - Democratic and Republican alike - are solidly against Trump's candidacy because he is an outsider and doesn't represent their world views or interests, it is a bit hard to discern exactly what it really happening.  And of course the media have demonized him for the same reason, which also obscures the underlying processes.Mitchell's piece is one of the better analyses I have seen.

Mitchell points out that since World War II the ruling elites of the world - the Davos crowd - have been selling identity politics (ie - segregating people into identity voting groups, like Afro-Americans, or Hispanics) and supra-national organizations and trade deals. This has been wonderful for the wealthier investor and professional classes, and for large corporations, but disastrous for the working classes. As he says:

Yes, Donald Trump is implicated in that unraveling, cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and political certainties with his rapid-fire Twitter account and persona that only the borough of Queens can produce. But so is Bernie Sanders. And so is Brexit. And so are the growing rumblings in Europe, which are all the more dangerous because there is no exit strategy if the European Union proves unsustainable. It is not so much that there are no new ideas for us to consider in 2016; it is more that the old ones are being taken apart without a clear understanding of what comes next. 2016 is the year of mental dust, where notions that stand apart from the post-1989 order don’t fully cohere. The 2016 election will be the first—but not last—test of whether they can.

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.

These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

There is no question that Trump has disrupted the Republican Party - and it badly needed disrupting. Bernie Sanders, had he won the nomination, would have done the same for the Democratic Party. If Trump loses, which is more likely than not, the Republicans will have to start the rethinking process while the Democrats, at least for the next four years, will most likely continue down their current dead-end path (and probably lose disastrously in the next election).

In any case , this piece is worth reading and thinking about.