Hey, media/academy/establishment parties - The public just aren't that into you.

From Touring Trumpland - And Finding it Largely Trumpless by Tim Blair.

I have viewed Trumps 2016 victory not so much as an indicator of the shifting balance between Left and Right but much more in keeping with the global rejection of established political parties by the great middle of voters. Established parties who claimed expertise and superior morality but who consistently failed to demonstrate either.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth of the media/academy/establishment parties complex is the wailing and gnashing of teeth of free riders who see their sinecures at risk.

Blair's reporting is consistent with this:

Exhausted by media obsession over Donald Trump’s divisive presidency, Russian collusion, threat to liberty and destruction of democracy, I recently went to the one place on earth where I could easily avoid hearing anything at all about Donald Trump.

I went to the United States.

Anyone who has not visited the US since Trump’s hilarious 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton might be surprised by the utter absence there of Trump in daily life. Everyday Americans are mostly just getting on with things, as normal, non-obsessive people tend to do. The apparent civil war we keep hearing about just isn’t happening.

Of course, certain precautions must be taken to avoid being drawn into a vortex of anti-Trump mania. During my visit I carefully avoided tiny outposts of Trump fixation, including Hollywood celebrity households, the offices of any former Clinton staffers and newsrooms at the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post and MSNBC.

I also dodged most college campuses, although a day or two at the excellent University of Iowa proved happily Trump-free.

It helps, too, if your point of arrival in the US isn’t California, where a ragtag pro-Hillary resistance movement remains active. Instead, I flew direct to Dallas before commencing a forensic multistate listening tour through Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

As it happens, all of those states voted for Trump. But their larger cities tended to side with Clinton, so a certain balance was available. If people from either side of the alleged Trump divide wished to speak out, I was there to hear them.

Except that nobody wanted to talk about Trump, Clinton or politics in general. This wasn’t due to apathy or lack of engagement. It was because there are more interesting topics of conversation, such as, well, just about everything. Work. Family. Sport. Music. Weather. Cars. Food. The semi-trailer carrying a few tons of bourbon that crashed and caught fire on the interstate. You know, topics people care about outside of election years.

I live in a red state but in a deep blue city and in a navy blue neighborhood in that blue city. I work with clients and people across the US. Aside from the Bay Area of California and a handful of still grieving Democrats, people rarely talk politics. The near hysteria of the media/academy/establishment parties is little apparent elsewhere.

In the mainstream media, much of the writing is either from the perspective of the hard left or the statist establishment Republicans. That is, perhaps at most, five percent of the population.

Very roughly, a third of the population are independent, roughly a third are Democrats, roughly a third are Republicans. I am guessing that for the independents, politics is a minuscule and episodic interest/concern. Even for those who are registered or self-identify as either Republican or Democrat, I would wager no more than a third of each follows politics deeply. So say, roughly 20-25% of the population finds politics very important. The other 75-80% of Americans go about their wonderful lives focusing on the real and important things while the 20-25% of their brethren fret the small stuff.

The fact that most of those 20-25%, and virtually all the most vocal and emotionally incontinent, are concentrated in the high-profile megaphonic industries of media/academy/establishment parties, further exacerbates the impression that everyone is dyed in the wool political fanatics. They aren't. The public just aren't into the self-anointed, preening, self-admiring media/academy/establishment parties.