Surprise, surprise, those Republican candidates who drone on about Donald Trump not really being a conservative may be right. But the perplexing question for them becomes, “So what if Republican voters really don’t care about that?”
Trump is popular, much more popular that any of the candidates pleading for conservative purity in their nominee. This is a shock to them as well as conservatives, including those on Fox News, the man named “Rush,” and “the conscience,” Glenn Beck.
Greg Sargent writes on-line for the Washington Post on Friday, January 29, 2016, “What if a lot of GOP voters don’t really care if Trump is a ‘real conservative’?” He writes:
Trump supporters aren’t particularly ideological. They are frustrated because they think America is in decline economically, culturally and militarily, threatened by other nations on the world stage and by foreigners here at home. They don’t care about economic arguments in favor of free trade or constitutional arguments for executive restraint. They don’t bat an eye when Trump touts the importance of government seizures of private property for non-public use or the virtues of single-payer healthcare….
A recent post on CNN politics, focuses on the words of Trump supporters. For many, the first thing that they mention is that he is the anti-Political Correctness figure in America. Actually, I’m not quite sure how many of these Trump supporters even know what political correctness is. I have a sense that they are feeling more of a visceral opposition to so much of what is considered proper, or “the right thing to do.”
I have previously written about how our schools and the educational system that we have in the United States tend to be 
factories for conservatives. Maybe I should have better said factories for alienated and disenfranchised people. For so many in our society, school meant being told what to do, when to do it, and actually what they should think (perish the thought of student’s own critical thinking or creativity). All the teachers in the schools who put down students for being “stupid” or just not knowing “how to be” may have created a “revenge movement” which Trump may be riding to the Republican nomination. This is not the revenge of the nerds; it’s a kind of backlash from the former students who were angry on a daily basis at the teachers and administrators at schools who wanted the kids to fit into a tight rigid box. All this sounds a little like rebelling against political correctness.
Oppression is school is much more of a common experience for students than anything else that may move students to be politically conservative or liberal. Frankly, I don’t know why it has taken so long. Perhaps it has been with us for fifty years or more, but it took a Trump to bring the water to a boil. He is showing a side of the American people, of our body politic, that has not been previously visible.
If you don’t like this apparent direction that our country is moving in, you might want to talk with teachers and administrators in schools about letting up on the homework, the humiliation, and the invisible pressure. Liberals are as much responsible for this as conservatives. We all have to clean up this house so that we don’t have runaway Trumps.