Today the New York Times published a "news analysis" titled "From Science to Diversity, Trump Hits the Reverse Button on Decades of Change." For those who do not read the Times--and I don't blame you--a "news analysis" is where a reporter writes an op-ed. It is not entirely objective, but instead allows a card-carrying journalist to tell us what he really thinks. Yet, if you read between the lines, you can actually see some admiration: Trump is doing what was once thought impossible. Consider this excerpt:
Mr. Trump's shift into reverse gear reflects the broader sentiments of many Americans eager for a change in course. The United States has cycled from progressive to conservative eras throughout its history. The liberal period ushered in by Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually led to a swing back to the right under Ronald Reagan, which led to a move toward the center under Bill Clinton.
But Mr. Trump has supercharged the current swing. The influential writer William F. Buckley Jr. once defined a conservative as someone standing athwart history and yelling, "Stop!" Mr. Trump seems to be standing athwart history yelling, "Go back!"
He has gone further than noted conservatives like Mr. Buckley, Mr. Reagan, Barry Goldwater or Robert Taft might have imagined possible. While they despised many of the New Deal and Great Society programs that liberal presidents introduced over the years, and sought to limit them, they recognized the futility of unraveling them altogether.
"They were living in an era dominated by liberals," said Sam Tanenhaus, author of "Buckley," a biography published last month. "The best they could hope for was to arrest, 'stop,' liberal progress. But what they dreamed of was a counterrevolution that would restore the country to an early time — the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
"Trump," he added, "has outdone them all, because he understands liberalism is in retreat. He has pushed beyond Buckley's 'stop,' and instead promises a full-throttle reversal."
Indeed, although Mr. Reagan vowed during his 1980 campaign to abolish the Department of Education, which had been created the year before over the objections of conservatives who considered it an intrusion on local control over schools, he never really tried to follow through as president, because Democrats controlled the House. The issue largely faded until Mr. Trump this year resurrected it and, unlike Mr. Reagan, simply ignored Congress to unilaterally order the department shuttered.
One of Trump's greatest strengths is his ability to not care what elites think. Usually, when the elites calls a conservative a racist or sexist or homophobe or something else, he wilts. When they accuse a conservative of trying to hurt poor people or roll back progress, he caves. When they charge a conservative with standing on the wrong side of the arc of history, he switches sides. Not Trump. He can almost single-handedly shift the Overton window on what topics are open for discussion. And Trump inspires other conservatives to likewise discount what elites think. That mantra has spread.
