In his Friday New York Times column, David Brooks confessed that Donald Trump's strategy of wooing former Bernie Sanders supporters into his camp is likely to fail, because as close as the two appear to be on issues of trade, the Republican candidate's "views on women and minorities are unacceptable to nearly everybody on the left."
However, Trump's campaign has given birth to the possibility of creating "a right-left populist coalition" based on support for "closed borders, trade barriers, local and nationalistic culture and an America First foreign policy." But Trump won't be able to personally benefit from these initial conditions to which he contributed, because
[t]here’s no evidence that he’s winning over many Sanders voters or downscale progressives. But where Trump fails, somebody else will succeed. And that’s where he’s substantively revolutionary. The old size-of-government question was growing increasingly archaic and obsolete. In country after country the main battle lines of debate are evolving toward the open/closed framework.
If you don’t like our current political polarization, wait 10 years. One way or another it will go away. When the frame of debate shifts to open/closed, sometime soon, the old coalitions will smash apart and new ones will form. Politics will be unrecognizable...
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