Regardless of what happens tonight in Iowa, angry voters are not going away

Ron Fournier writes in National Journal,

Trump and Sanders have ex­ceeded ex­pect­a­tions be­cause their ap­peal has far less to do with who they are than who they rep­res­ent: the vast swell of Amer­ic­ans who want the polit­ic­al sys­tem shaken up.

Two-thirds of Amer­ic­ans think their coun­try is on the “wrong track.” Three-quar­ters say life for the next gen­er­a­tion will be worse than it was for their par­ents, the op­pos­ite of the Amer­ic­an dream. Trust in gov­ern­ment is at a re­cord low. For the first time in the his­tory of Gal­lup polling, ap­prov­al rat­ings for the Demo­crat­ic and Re­pub­lic­an parties dipped be­low 40 per­cent. Most Amer­ic­ans say party lead­ers care more about them­selves than the coun­try.

In the 1990s, “swing voters” were all the rage. Since 2004, the polit­ic­al es­tab­lish­ment has been in­fatu­ated with party-line or “base voters.” Trump and Sanders are chan­nel­ing a con­stitu­en­cy that is as old as the re­pub­lic and still flexes new muscle: “protest voters.”

...The reas­ons for people’s frus­tra­tion vary. For some, it’s stalled eco­nom­ic pro­gress and in­equal­ity. Oth­ers fear the evol­u­tion of ter­ror­ism since 9/11. Still oth­ers are un­settled by the rap­id pace of demo­graph­ic change, which made 2004 the first year in which the ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­an kinder­gart­ners were minor­it­ies. Most people share the be­lief that the polit­ic­al sys­tem is broken.

The pub­lic’s anxi­ety is jus­ti­fied—and you don’t need to be a big­ot to feel it. But, as his­tory shows, the com­bin­a­tion of an­ger and new tech­no­logy al­ways makes Amer­ic­ans sus­cept­ible to pop­u­list ap­peals and dem­agogues. Like Huey Long, Fath­er Charles Cough­lin, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot be­fore them, Trump and Sanders speak in the blunt lan­guage of the left-be­hind.

In the last dec­ade or so, the coun­try has struggled through the biggest eco­nom­ic trans­ition since the end of the ag­ri­cul­tur­al era, the most sig­ni­fic­ant tech­no­lo­gic­al surge since the in­dus­tri­al era, a ma­jor demo­graph­ic makeover, and two ma­jor post-9/11 wars. Through it all, our lead­ers have failed to ad­apt, caus­ing a col­lapse in the pub­lic’s faith in vir­tu­ally every so­cial in­sti­tu­tion.

Per­son­ally, I find Trump’s au­thor­it­ari­an­ism and nativ­ism far more re­pel­lent than Sanders’s brand of so­cial­ism. Still, there is one thing scar­i­er to me than Trump win­ning the pres­id­ency. It’s Trump los­ing the White House to an es­tab­lish­ment can­did­ate who de­fends the status quo for an­oth­er four years, a feck­less Demo­crat or Re­pub­lic­an who ca­pit­u­lates to the cul­ture of Wash­ing­ton rather than change it.

Read more here.