Now that the Donald Trump IS, against all expectations, the Republican nominee for President, many people (including many Republicans) are wondering how it all came to this. One Ezra Klein of Vox says Donald Trump’s nomination scares him. He clearly isn’t alone. But as surprising and unexpected as the Donald Trump rise has been, people have been falling all over themselves to try and explain it. Many of the explanations have ranged from the dismissive (racism, loss of white male power) to the more thoughtful (stalled economy, feeling of being left behind).

So what has happened?

When something disruptive like a Donald Trump happens, it is usually an indication that something is wrong in society. It means that a significant fraction of a population has become alienated from whatever system we are talking about. Browbeating the population, as some center-left media outlets are currently attempting to do, won’t get anyone to change their mind. A more useful exercise is to examine why people feel alienated (in this case on the center-right).

Personally, I believe that there are several reasons.

1.)    Government doesn’t function well on a day to day basis.

While the left will talk about Ted Cruz and shutting down the government, I am talking about the fact that so many people experience the government (and government regulations) as useless B.S. that adds no value to their lives, wastes time, and hinders them from being productive. During the heyday of “Big Government” (1930 to 1970), people supported it (to the dismay of small government conservatives) because it visibly made life better than it had before. If you took someone through a time machine from 1930 to 1970, they would be amazed at how much better everything was. The schools were better, the roads were better, the cities functioned better, there was more electricity, etc. Government was bigger, and things obviously functioned better.

But today, government doesn’t function. It doesn’t secure the border as it is surely obligated to do. Education is a joke. Tax forms are byzantine, and the roads & infrastructure are falling apart. With the Democrats touting largely the same things that they have for 30 or 40 years, and the Republicans afraid to actually make significant changes, the stagnation has reached a point that people are willing to try anything that might have a chance of making things better.

2.)    Government is corrupt.

There is a feeling that people in government get special treatment. People are supposed to be equal under the law, but it has become increasingly apparent that this is not actually the case. People who break the rules, as long as they break the rules in a left-wing direction, suffer no serious consequences. Whether Lois Lerner using the IRS to target Tea Party groups (more on that later), or people falsifying records at the Veteran’s Administration and getting away with it, people feel that they are ending up on the short end of the stick and that the existing rules that would correct this injustice won’t be applied. The most significant example is the lack of an indictment for Hillary Clinton. The FBI director started out by say that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges in this case, and ended by saying that other people in similar situations would likely face charges. Translation: You little people would face charges, but Hillary Clinton to too important a person to be held accountable for her actions.

3.)    Government/Media Abuse Of The Center-Right.

Since Barack Obama was sworn in as President in 2009, the national media has treated opposition to his agenda as illegitimate. The media won’t stand up for the rights of conservatives/Republicans; the groups who would naturally oppose the agenda of a Democrat President. When the IRS abuses ordinary citizens trying to exercise their rights to participate, the media says nothing. When there is a mass shooting, the media tries to slander center-right groups of citizens by immediately implying that they might be responsible (and then are visibly disappointed when this turn out not to be the case). The media says nothing when the government effectively forces people to violate their consciences if they want a certain job. They say nothing when the government forces religious groups to violate their principles (such as paying for birth control). The media didn’t really come to the defense of Fox News when the Obama Administration tried to declare that it wasn’t a legitimate media organization, something a government has no right to do. Whether the right to free speech, the right to practice one’s religion (not just in church on Sunday, but also in one’s daily life), a free press, and the right to own a firearm: the government has been abusing these rights at various times, and the media is remarkably tolerant of these abuses. Consequently, the government AND the media have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the center-right.

4.)    Government Ignores The Feelings Of Large Swaths Of America.

The economy is stagnant. Manufacturing has been outsourced. The middle class is shrinking. Economic insecurity is growing. Illegal Immigrants are impacting social services and competing for blue collar jobs. And the government refuses to do anything. It cuts trade deals that disadvantage American workers. It tells Americans that wanting to reduce or eliminate illegal immigration makes them a bad person. It has actively opposed state governments (who are dealing with the fallout of illegal immigration) from taking actions on their own to enforce existing immigration law. This is not necessarily to say that America should have less immigration or that freer trade has been a net negative for America as a whole. But the fact is that these policies DO produce losers as well as winners. And the people who feel unsettled and disadvantaged by the economic shifts of the last 30 years are being ignored and not being addressed.

In short, these four factors, broadly speaking, have provided an opening for someone like a Donald Trump to run and actually become the nominee for President of a major political party. And given that his opponent is so unpopular too, he actually has a chance of winning. A government, and their media allies, can’t continuously abuse a certain (significant) segment of the population and expect to continue to have legitimacy in that population. A government can’t continue to ignore the needs of a significant fraction of its people and expect to maintain legitimacy. Someone, or some organization, will rise to stand up for that forgotten and ignored portion of the population. Donald Trump is a warning. Win or lose, something will have to change. Otherwise, the U.S. is in for a prolonged period of, dare I say it, political instability.