Well, Chait's piece was really annoying

But not for the reason they say.

Atrios and of course KOS accept Chait's "racist, blithering idiot voters" explanation for Trump's success because that's the left wing line on every last Republican voter, politician, or agenda item, anyway.

So what else would they say?

(Well, yeah, they forgot "misogynist," and "authoritarian," but let that pass.)

What they don't accept is that Trump's victory could not be seen coming throughout the primary season, insisting it was in the polls all along.

But of course it was not.

Trump, behind everyone at the outset, soon became the most popular of those running for the Republican nomination, yes.

But it was far from obvious that as others among the original 17 competitors dropped out the majority of primary voters would not coalesce around a remaining real Republican.

Epistemically speaking, there was always a decent chance that they would.

But it turns out - and this was indeed and very legitimately a surprise - that far too many Republican voters are not in sympathy with the official conservative commitments of the Party to bare-knuckle capitalism on steroids, to drowning the government in a bathtub, to abolishing entitlements and erasing everything built by over a century of progressivism.

Their actual ideology turns out to be a tincture, ranging from faint to vivid, of what I have called "Buchananism," everything in Pat Buchanan's well-known worldview minus most of the actual conservatism.

For example, though they want America to be strong and safe their support for anything like the established American globalism is weak and skeptical at most, in contrast to the reigning dogmas of both major parties.

And they like Social Security, Medicare, and many aspects of Big Government, in total defiance of the Republican Party's official views and its decades of celebration of Goldwater/Reagan/Thatcherism.

But they are not Democrats because their biggest agenda items are the Wall and trade protectionism, and they are completely estranged by Democratic collaboration in the privileging in law and in culture of hostility to all things white, male, or more-or-less traditional in America.

They are indeed in large measure beleaguered and fearful whites circling their wagons.

But, contrary to the official ideology and standard propaganda of the Democrats and everyone else further left, that makes them racists no more than the agendas of the NAACP, NARAL, or other nakedly tribal organizations that support and are supported by Democrats makes those organizations racist or misandrist - though racism, misandry, and misogyny are certainly not uncommon in politics or among Americans at large, just where you would expect to find them.