Why the establishment was blindsided by Donald Trump

[Commentary] If you are reading this sentence, you participate in a minority cultural practice. You get your news by reading traditional newspapers, whether in print or online. Let some facts sink in. Barely more than a decade ago, the majority of Americans with a high school degree or above were daily readers of traditional print newspapers and their news sites. This is no longer true. Now, at best, about 40 percent of American adults “often” get their news from newspapers and their websites. In contrast, roughly 60 percent often get their news from television. Of course, television has dominated since the era of the broadcast big three. What’s new is reading’s precipitous decline.

The country’s conversational universe has split between those who primarily get their news by reading and those who primarily depend on watching and listening. I say primarily because of course few people are exclusively in one camp or the other, and many of us also participate in circulating news via social media. But where we spend most of our time matters. On that we are split. Understanding American public opinion now means discerning three things: what the conversation sounds like on TV and radio, what it sounds like in traditional text-based journalism, and how these two conversations differ. Understanding our political dynamics means spotting how those streams do or don’t mingle, and tracking the eddies, riptides and surf storms their convergences generate. In this campaign, we haven’t seen a silent majority suddenly awoken. Instead, we’ve seen a coming-of-age of a vocal minority that was nearly invisible to another vocal minority, the community of readers of traditional text-based journalism, a community dominated by the professional classes. Over the past nine months, these two minorities have been battling for the country’s soul.

[Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University]