How Facebook Envy Fuels Donald Trump - Tom Nichols - The Federalist

Donald Trump is the avatar of the triumph of the politics of resentment.  He had predecessors - Paul LePage and Chris Christie prominent among them.  But a less blustery and coded version has been a powerful theme of the Republican Party since Reagan,  if not Nixon.  Until Trump there was room for a subdued version - George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism gave us Medicare Part D and a refusal to demonize Muslims - despite the Iraq war debacle. 

Tom Nichols who is an historian at the Naval War College is a self-described stay and fight Republican.  He has an interesting take on what fuels the triumph of resentment.  Though race is a major force it is more than that. Nichols traces it to envy magnified by social media which has yileded the revolt of the comfortable. -gwc
How Facebook Envy Fuels Donald Trump  - Tom Nichols - The Federalist

I blame a lot of people for Donald Trump. (Mostly, I blame Donald Trump.) “Trumpism,” insofar as we can call it a movement, is the product of many social forces. Some of the anger that propels Trump is a reaction to political correctness and elitist condescension; some an irrational, even racist, fear of changing demographics; some understandable rage at the painful and disparate impact of globalization. And some of it is just the lousy luck that 16 other Republicans, including a batch of no-hopers, all decided to run when Trump did.

But look past Trump’s public monkeyshines, and find one emotion that especially motivates his supporters: envy. Or, to use a more evocative French term, it is ressentiment, the need to blame others for one’s own frustration and circumstances......

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