In general I consider James Fallows a valuable public voice, but I find this article disappointing. It fails to talk honestly about the serious reasons for fear or anger than many Americans have toward the mainstream media and the liberal intelligentsia. Let me quickly list some of these reasons.
America's relative power in the world is rapidly decreasing. For the first time since the late 1800's America is no longer the world's largest economy by certain important measures. China is, and it it still growing much faster than we are. China is rapidly arming, and is already ahead of us in multiple different types of weapon systems. In thirty year it it could have an economy twice the size of America's and much more sophisticated weaponry.
There are large areas of America in which the real value of average incomes has decreased substantially, such as in the rust belt.
Political correctness means that many tens of millions of people with traditional values are being constantly told by the mainstream media that their value are all wrong. Any one who publicly dares question or provide counter arguments to this political correctness is subject vicious public attack.
Race relations are not allowed to be honestly discussed in our media. For month after month in both the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases the mainstream media's propaganda message was that those killings were unjustified murders -- when, in fact, the majority of the evidence in both cases indicated those killings were totally justified as self defense. The politically correct racism of the media hypes the notion of white guilt, but greatly downplays the much larger problem of black guilt, including the fact that blacks have seven times the per capita violent crime and murder rates as whites and that blacks murder twice as many whites as whites murder blacks.
So why aren't whites allowed to protest that White Lives Matter? Because that would be racist? No! It's because political correctness, itself, is a racist/sexist double standard.
And no major candidate but Trump has had the balls to attack political correctness as much as he has (although his crude attacks are neither well reasoned or articulate).
