The following is an exclusive excerpt for The National Pulse readers from the new MAGA blockbuster book, The Emerging Populist Majority, by Gavin Wax and Troy Olson, published by Bombardier Books. The National Pulse editor Raheem Kassam wrote the foreword to this book, and the following excerpt is from Chapter 4, which deals with the ‘Boomer Alignment’ beginning in 1992.
In many ways, the Trump coalition that would shock the political world in the biggest upset in American presidential politics since 1948 is a combination of Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge and Ross Perot’s candidacy and issues. The first vote for president that Donald Trump would ever receive was actually from Perot’s political party that launched and then was unable to find any sort of successor—the Reform Party in California. Both Buchanan and Trump were possible candidates in 2000 for that nomination. All of this occurred before Trump switched his registration to Democratic in New York, among six other party switches in that closed primary state. Yet despite all those switches there remains a remarkable clarity and consistency on the actual issues and vision. The future anti-Trump coalition are those most committed to the globalization consensus that became established after the 1992 election, which was then brought into hyperdrive and defended by the party establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans.
The Third Civic Order was articulated as needing to make the world safe for democracy, and in the twenty-first century, the more democracy would begin to slip into a recession after the first few years of the War on Terror, the harder it would become to maintain the consensus. Consider the 1992 election results but between only the two challengers to the incumbent (see the map below).
What you see here is a remarkable consistency between the country that elected every Democratic president after Harry Truman, with Democrat Bill Clinton putting together a coalition at the county and state levels that is very similar to Jimmy Carter and to a lesser extent, John F. Kennedy, and independent candidate Ross Perot, a full-on skeptic of free trade and the downstream effects of the new economy that would end up propping up the stability of the Boomer Alignment, and therefore the late Third Civic Order, performing incredibly well in what essentially is the old, old Republican coalition of Yankeedom (Northeast) and the Heartland (Midwest) all the way out west and to the coast. Of course, in the three decades since, a lot of Clinton’s strongest counties, especially in rural America, have gone away from the Democrats, which has made it incredibly difficult for their political results and outcomes to match their aspirations, and the cities have slipped further away as they had for many decades from the Republicans, that is…until the last eight years or so in many of the former industrialized areas.
First under Clinton and a Republican Congress, then under George W. Bush, who endured split, Republican, and Democratic Congresses, the uniparty consensus of liberal immigration bordering on a borderless vision of the world, of free trade and capital flowing throughout, and after 9/11, a foreign policy of undeclared, abstract, unwinnable, and forever wars made the Boomer Alignment and uniparty consensus harder and harder to swallow downstream.
And this is where the emerging populist majority, as a rejection of hyper-globalization, really begins to take shape.
