I seem to recall a certain Freeper, *coughCompanyMancough* who said, ‘We are witnessing the left-right paradigm crumbling before our very eyes”, or something like that. Man, that dude was prescient as all get out!
We had to have him...taken care of, you know what I mean? He...he knew...too much...
This is good stuff, and I'll quote an embedded quotataion at length because it echoes what you were saying:
as Angelo Codevilla writes today. “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.
“This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.”
It's actually worse than that: it has turned what once was its base into that very opposition. That class need not be afraid of the Democrats, it needs to be afraid of us, and it appears from a certain growing hysteria that it has recognized the threat too late.
This is, as you pointed out, a paradigmatic shift. Trump is in the enviable position of not even having to make good on his promises, although I suspect he will. What is significant is that the disgust and revulsion with which middle class America has come to regard our would-be lords has coalesced around Trump's - let's face it - unlikely figure. That's a black swan. Trump personally isn't even the point, the point is that a Trump has become possible. That's an awful lot of comfortable, arrogant assumptions tossed onto the garbage heap of history.
I don't think the situation is recoverable for the ruling class, and I thank God for it. They're aristocrats looking out their windows and seeing tumbrels start to roll where jeweled carriages once kept them from contact with the unwashed masses. They now can hope that the tumbrels are not leading to a guillotine. If they don't, it's because this is America and not revolutionary France. Sometimes I wish they would.
The Left wants redistribution of the wealth of the wealthy (with the Leftists presuming that they will get their share of that redistribution).
Now, even the Left is starting to realize that unlimited immigration and H1B will mean that the existing citizens of the US will be redistributed FROM, for the benefit of the underclass of the Third World. And they don't like that idea.
You want to turn a Black government union member into a Republican Trump supporter? Mention to him that HIS pension might be at risk if we try to absorb much more of the world's poor, and in doing so risk the viability of the tax base which funds his benefits.