BRET STEPHENS: Hey, maybe I shouldn’t have called Trump voters idiots and traitors.

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
What were they seeing that I wasn’t?

That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.

I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.

Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.

It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.

Remember, this is the NYT’s idea of a “conservative” columnist.

UPDATE (From Ed): On the other hand, Stephens’ column represents a small amount of progress for the MSM: NYT’s Bret Stephens Becomes First Corporate Media Figure To Acknowledge Russian Collusion Was A ‘Hoax.’

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): From the comments: “This is the inter-elections decompression season, when the liberal media admits their past lies, now, when it doesn’t matter, in order to ‘prove’ their credibility for future lies, when it does matter.”