Scott Gibbons at The Millenial City:

“As I wrote in my book, Trumped by History: The Resurrection of the Great American Middle Class, then suddenly, out of left field came the perennial celebrity Donald Trump. He did not come from within any institution or discipline, and his ideas and platform coalesced rapidly through interaction with various populist personalities, frustration and thought waves. Trump most famously recognized and sanctioned the downtrodden great American middle class and drew those people out of long-term seclusion into increased and open expression of opinion. He resuscitated them and suddenly by just wearing MAGA caps their long suppressed opinions were clear to everyone.

As I wrote in Trumped by History, in bypassing the mainstream institutions and processes, Donald Trump starkly defined the conflict between the middle class and the techno-managerial elite, drawing his supporters fully into the open for the first time since they had lost their social dominance in the 1960s. At the same time, he elicited a virulent opposition to himself personally from establishment conservatives whose ideology was thought in principle to be nearly the same as that of his supporters – revealing both left and right to be the true techno-managerial elite enemy of the great American middle class.”

Gibbons suggests that the Trump presidency failed to dislodge the techno-managerial ruling class and only enriched its own self, thereby leaving its followers even more vulnerable than before.

This is a pessimistic and widely-held analysis that I don’t share, because I never subscribed to the belief that Trump came from no where. I was quite clear-eyed from the beginning about who Trump was. I realized he was a liberal from the heart of the establishment – he was, after all, sent out to sell the financial bail-out to the public. There was his family’s decades-long coziness with mob figures, his ties to the Clintons, and his family ties to the media and to the Jewish establishment. He would never have become that popular without that.

However, to me he represented an opening, a disruption that had the potential to shake things up and move them in an unexpected direction. That potential did not exist with Hillary Clinton.

Trump blew up the place verbally.

And that created a space for the middle class to express itself. Whatever else did not get accomplished by his presidency, that did.

And it can not be undone.