It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Donald J. Trump ran his insurgency presidential campaign against the coordinated opposition of every single powerful institution in the Western world.
The single decisive factor working in Trump's favor was his ability to appeal to the millions of ‘forgotten' Americans who felt particularly ill-served by these institutions.
Trump's shock victory was therefore simultaneously a stinging indictment of America's elite institutions and a surprising vindication of the functional legitimacy of our democracy. After all, if a candidate is able to win in spite of near-unanimous opposition of a country's elite institutions, this says something reassuring about the workings of democracy per se. In this way, populist elections, in which the divide between the elite candidate and the ‘people's' candidate are most pronounced, serve as a special kind of democratic ‘stress test.'
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