DONALD TRUMP AND THE GHOST OF CHRISTOPHER LASCH:

In The Revolt of the Elites Lasch foresaw the disconnect between the nation’s political classes and the governed, as UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge has recently observed. America’s elites have devoted so much energy to building their collective moral system that they expect ideological obedience. When Trumpists say strong families in the 1950s were a positive, the cognoscenti respond: “So what. It was a terrible time for minorities and gays.”

Trump’s armies feel the sting of comfortable, upscale, post-industrial winners who can barely conceal their contempt for those they dismiss as Wal-Mart people. The disdain for yeoman America—which is overwhelmingly white—is visceral, longstanding, and profound.

“Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television,” Lasch wrote in 1995, not yesterday. “They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.”

Read the whole thing.

Related: Monday’s Newsweek headline: “I’d Like to Sincerely Apologize for Texas.”

Why? As National Interest noted in a 2014 article headlined, “Texas: America’s Economic Miracle?”, “Since the peak of U.S. GDP in 2007, Texas has contributed 32 percent of all economic growth in the United States. That is an astounding number. From 2007 through the end of 2013, the U.S. economy grew by $702 billion, and Texas grew by $220.5 billion.”

In 2010, the Washington Post offloaded the Newsweek brand name to a private investor for one dollar.