Now I would expect somebody to show some intellectual integrity and draw a lesson from this. “Experts” said Trump did not stand of chance of winning the Republican nomination, “experts” said that the Republican party was finished, because of demographics and America becoming a much more diverse country, “experts” said Hillary won every single one of the debates, and a few days before the moment of reckoning “experts”, supported by consistent polls, said Hillary was already confidently moving her furniture and staff in the White House and was going to be the first woman President. Now these “experts” should probably think of a career change. They have proven to be extremely good at reading the latest numbers and juggling with statistics, but they have failed miserably at reading the feelings of the people. To be honest, it would be refreshing to see some of these folks, journalists, professors, professional commentators and other “experts”, throw the towel in despair at their analytical abilities and quit their jobs, hoping to have the chance to start anew in a different trade. But this is probably to expect far too much from them.

Donald Trump won in spite of probably having (almost) the whole of the media and the “chattering classes” against him. His message was not terribly articulate but it was clear and resonated very well with a lot of people: the system is broken and rigged. It is not the sort of people our “experts” wanted to know of, however. Trump supporters have been dismissed, right from the beginning, by the “intellectual elite” as a bunch of troglodytes, racists, a backward, anti-Semitic, homophobic, isolationist, anti-feminist, nostalgic, bigot ed and uneducated mob: and the “intellectual elite” not only failed to understand their concerns, they seemed not to be interested in wanting to understand the worries of the working men, dismissing Trump’s narrative of a corrupt Washington system as populist appeals and sometimes calling it a paranoid vision or a straight lie. It seems strange to see that exactly those who never tire of praising the unquestionable superiority of our supposedly democratic institutions have such a little opinion of the electorate.

This could actually be the beginning of a revolution, akin to the Reagan’s revolution. We cannot really know this now. For some in the media a Trump victory was portrayed as nothing short of the beginning of the apocalypses, even if they held it highly improbable, because they were too busy trying to assassinate Trump’s character in every possible thinkable way that they could not notice what was happening. They were saying Trump’s supporters lived in their own alternate ugly reality. Now in spite of them having called the race over well too early (possibly in a sort of a malicious electoral strategy), somehow I cannot imagine these people doing a lot of soul searching, or suddenly starting to be plagued by self doubt and asking themselves who really lives in an alternate world. The media is always right. Even when they are wrong, they are actually right. Nobody would take them seriously if they were not crazy enough to project confidence at all times.

From the comfort of their prestigious jobs as political commentators for Newsweek, CNN or the New York Times, or their tenured professorships at $ 100,000 a year, the worries of many Americans might really have seemed unreal to many “experts”. The system has worked well for people like them after all. It is often people of liberal persuasion, who, on paper, display of lot of sympathy for the underprivileged. But they never really understood them and they are happy that they are not them, because they despise them and not even so secretly. Many “experts” have resorted to the concept of “populism” to explain the Trump phenomenon. Call it whatever you want, but this is the essence of the democracy. Populism or democracy, it does not matter, the principle is the same. The people win. And you, “experts”, lost. The vote for Trump was a vote against you.