Americans are rejecting an offer of managed American decline from the political class, said veteran pollster Pat Caddell on Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM.
Drawing on Dylan Thomas’s 1947 poem, Caddell waxed poetic during a discussion with SiriusXM host and Breitbart News’ Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon.
“They will not go gently into that good night of decline,” said Caddell. “The American people will rage against the dying of the light, and that is the moment that we are continuing toward.”
The narrative of American decline — commensurate with relative ascendancies from global competitors among the world’s emerging economies – is often frame by progressive elites as both an inevitable and desirable trajectory.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency, said Bannon, was a function of popular rejection of American decline:
“It’s one of the things I told then-candidate Trump … ‘[Caddell’s] underlying research shows that the country’s heading your way, that it’s two-thirds [of Americans view the country on the] wrong track. More importantly, that America, 70 or 75 percent of the people believe America is in decline.’”
“And in fact,” continued Bannon, “What the establishment wants, and what the opposition to President Trump wanted, was really managed decline; and what President Trump represented with the ‘Make America Great Again’ – and the ‘again’ is the key word, there – was the deplorables, that working class and middle class people of this country were not prepared to accept the central thesis that America was in decline.”
Caddell’s research into American perceptions of national decline, said Bannon, formed the “intellectual basis” for the “Trump movement.”
Electoral support for Trump, said Caddell, was rooted in three popular beliefs: 1. “The system is corrupt;” 2. “The country is decline;” and 3. “Things are rigged against them in the political class.” READ MORE
