Originally Posted by Guest

It has been often said the ultimate value of conservatism and populism is to question authority, to question the status quo, and to move away from corrupting “bigness” and move back toward the citizenry. Sometimes the Democratic Party runs against the corrupt status quo, as did FDR, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Other times, the Republican Party does, as with Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.

This time, Donald J. Trump ran on a platform of anti-corruption, anti-Washington and anti-Bigness.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat said that Trump’s platform and appeal to the people “is like nothing we have seen before — a shatterer of all norms and conventional assumptions, a man more likely to fail catastrophically than other presidents, more constitutionally dangerous than other presidents, but also more likely to carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president.” Douthat is wrong.

In what is perhaps the most upset election of American history, the experts, the media, the pollsters, all were proven wrong by the American people and the American electorate.

Trump represents much — not all but much — that American conservatism had strived for over the years. An outsider who has a skeptical view of not just the government establishment, but the importance of conservative judges and conservative members of the cabinet in order to restrain government. A survey of history shows that Trump is not a detour, but consistent with American presidential tradition.