The full title of this book is \u201cThe Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.\u201d \u00a0When I was told I needed to read this I was a little resentful.\u00a0 I don\u2019t enjoy reading about politics for the most part.\u00a0 This may be because lately political books are typically candidates telling us their inspirational biographies and why they are uniquely qualified to save the United States and by extension the whole free world.\u00a0 Obama, Hillary, McCain, blah, blah, blah.\u00a0 But I dutifully bought it two months ago and put it into the stack.<\/p>\n
So, I started it.\u00a0 It\u2019s a combination of election analysis identifying the categories of voters who flipped the election to Donald Trump and then interviews with people in those categories.\u00a0 The analysis is interesting but the interviews are riveting.\u00a0 As someone who understands the anger over being categorized as a deplorable or being dismissed as unimportant or openly mocked as a defeated yesterday man with no future I was fascinated.\u00a0 The stories being told by people from small towns and dying cities in the Rust Belt resonated like a tuning fork with what I felt.\u00a0 Now here I am, an Italian American from Brooklyn living in New England and an engineer working in a 21st<\/sup> century industry and yet I feel more kinship with these unemployed factory workers and small business people than with any of the people I work with every day who don\u2019t believe in any of the things I do.<\/p>\n They voted for Trump for a variety of reasons depending on the type of person or their specific circumstances but as a whole they were voting for the idea that they still counted and couldn\u2019t be just discounted because they weren\u2019t the coalition of tomorrow.\u00a0 Their grievances weren\u2019t progressive enough and they were too white.\u00a0 They were old news.\u00a0 And the interesting thing so far is that all of them that voted in 2008 and 2012 voted for Obama.\u00a0 I\u2019ve still got a bunch to read and I have to digest the analytical stuff to see what it means to my understanding of national politics but I can already see that the personal stories are the bigger news.\u00a0 This proves to me that the Trump rallies were very significant.\u00a0 A lot of these people voted because it was personal.\u00a0 Trump reached them with his message.\u00a0 It spoke to them.\u00a0 These marginalized people in depressed areas of what used to be the industrial heartland resonated to a message from a billionaire New York City reality show cartoon character.\u00a0 I think this means both parties have abandoned a very large swathe of Americans and if Trump can address what they want he actually could ignite a Populist Revolt.\u00a0 If most people figure out that they\u2019ve been used by both parties we could have a real awakening and some big things can get done.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll get into more detail when I finish this, but I\u2019ve already learned more about the 2016 election from reading the personal accounts than by all the political analyses that came out in the last almost two years.\u00a0 I\u2019ve met the people that made Trump president.\u00a0 Zito and Todd have written an important book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The full title of this book is \u201cThe Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.\u201d \u00a0When I was told I needed to read<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237,6],"tags":[1344,1348,739,1345,1347,1346,1066,16,540],"class_list":["post-4341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-trump","tag-2016-election","tag-brad-todd","tag-in-trump-we-trust","tag-inside-the-populist-coalition-reshaping-american-politics","tag-salena-zito","tag-salena-zito-and-brad-todd","tag-the-great-revolt","tag-trump","tag-trumpocalypse"],"yoast_head":"\n