NOT QUITE REAGAN DEMOCRATS.

There's a lengthy John Judis essay on what he calls Middle American Radicals.  "If you take ac­count of changes over the years to the edu­ca­tion­al level and oc­cu­pa­tion­al pro­file of the Amer­ic­an work­force, there is a straight line between the MARS who flocked to Wal­lace and those who have backed Perot, Buchanan, and Trump."  Here's his analysis of what touches that populist, aligned with, but not identical to, Tea Party, nerve.

Sev­er­al con­di­tions have, in the past, proved cru­cial. One is a wide­spread sense of na­tion­al de­cline. That was cer­tainly the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the United States was mired in Vi­et­nam; in the early 1990s, when the United States faced a pro­trac­ted eco­nom­ic slow­down; and again from 2008 to the present. When the sense of doom has lif­ted, as it did when the Clin­ton boom began in the spring of 1996, the MARS vot­ing bloc has gradu­ally weakened.

The second con­di­tion is pro­nounced dis­trust of the lead­er­ship in Wash­ing­ton. Wal­lace’s MARS were angry about the fed­er­al in­ter­ces­sion in race re­la­tions. In the early 1990s, many con­ser­vat­ive voters felt be­trayed that Bush had broken his prom­ise not to raise taxes, while oth­ers were en­raged by the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s seem­ing in­dif­fer­ence to the re­ces­sion and the grow­ing clout of for­eign lob­by­ists in Wash­ing­ton. That sense of dis­trust com­pletely lif­ted after Septem­ber 11, 2001, when Amer­ic­ans saw the na­tion­al gov­ern­ment as their pro­tect­or. But it has re­turned dur­ing the Obama years: Middle Amer­ic­an Rad­ic­als saw Obama’s re­cov­ery pro­gram and his health care plan as a sop to Wall Street and the poor—which the middle class would have to pay for.

Mr Judis suggests that there are insufficiently many angry voters to get Mr Trump beyond where Patrick Buchanan or Ross Perot got, let alone to Governor Wallace's electoral votes in 1968.  But the contradictions are still there to be heightened.

With the world eco­nomy still in the doldrums, an on­go­ing crisis in the Middle East, and a po­lar­ized and para­lyzed Wash­ing­ton, I doubt it. What’s most likely is that Middle Amer­ic­an Rad­ic­al­ism will keep sim­mer­ing, un­til it finds a new cham­pi­on and boils over once again.

Ultimately, it might be the disaffected voters who haven't been voting that will determine the outcome.