Trump carried every county in Iowa except one. What accounts for the Trump juggernaut?
 
Our take is that all his rivals, Biden included, promise to be better leaders of the established order. Trump embodies rejection, even disdain, for the establishment.
 
For years now, Americans have seen that nothing much works as it should. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens explains that Trump is riding “a wave of pessimism.” Referring to Alana Newhouse’s writing, Stephens notes that “brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government.”
 
This brokenness is caused not by poor leadership, in our view, but by system failure—bureaucratic and legal systems that prevent real people from rolling up their sleeves and solving real problems. Trump promises to knock down this system. What the country needs is a coherent vision of how to replace it.
 
In a column last week, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, argues that political parties must respond to “a nation in search of ‘can do’ democracy.” Quoting from Philip Howard's forthcoming book, Everyday Freedom, Marshall gives numerous examples of how “‘America is suffering from a crisis of human disempowerment.’”
 
Many voters, perhaps a majority, need a vision for change and re-empowerment, not the same system plodding forward.