A Crisis of Confidence

What Caddell understood better than anyone else, even during the 2016 election, is that mainstream America doesn’t care for social justice, violent activism, or radical change. They want blue collar jobs, a stable economy, low crime, and a positive future without being hectored by self-righteous hypocrites with a treasury of counterfeit virtue. In other words, they don’t like Yankees. Trump may not be from the South, but as a real New Yorker, he was certainly more genuine than the poseurs that masqueraded as candidates from both parties. Americans can tolerate moral failings so long as the candidate seems authentic. 

What the establishment didn’t get then–and what they don’t get now–is that the Crisis of Confidence speech honestly reflected the American character, and the “silent majority,” which may not be a crushing mandate in 2019, still believes in a Southern Jeffersonian order. Promoting it with a Southern accent helps, but most Americans will take a New Yorker with Jeffersonian principles as long as he champions the “rebirth of the American spirit.

Pat Caddell died on February 16. Several major news outlets ran stories about his influence in both the Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump campaigns. Everyone understood Caddell’s role as the voice of the “outsider.” A colleague at the College of Charleston, where Caddell served in the Political Science department for the last couple of years, said that Caddell hated everything about modern politics, including the corporate press. Caddell viewed the world as the people versus the establishment. Party didn’t matter, only ideas, which is why he could move seamlessly between Democrat and Republican campaigns.