So I guess Bernie's unprecedented campaign was just coincidence? As well as the abject failure of garden variety Republican neoliberals promising more of the same (Jeb, Rubio, etc.)? Over the last three elections, the outsider/ anti-establishment candidate won. First, Obama upset Clinton for the nomination in 2008, and then went on to soundly defeat McCain. And then he comfortably beat Romney, a caricature of Wall Street globalist vulture capitalism, in 2012 despite his weakness as an incumbent. And this year, the party affiliations flipped, but the trend still held. Clinton, the corrupt establishmentarian, got crushed by the populist outsider.
Got a cite for that? And aren't you fond of pointing out that we live in a Republic, not a direct democracy, making the broad distribution of voters far more important than their number? From my vantage, #NeverTrump was basically limited to the conservative intelligentsia, and it clearly had very little impact on the outcome of this election. Which neatly illustrates how much electoral power your preferred brand of politics commands these days.
I assume you mean "Trump won despite Trumpism, not because of it." Which gets it exactly backwards. Trumpism won despite Trump's personal shortcomings. Look at the populism sweeping Europe. The future belongs to politicians like Trump and Bernie.
