By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS—Amid all the shouting and noise generated by the 2020 presidential campaign, a surprising thing has become apparent.

Many Americans – perhaps most Americans – agree on something.

And that is that the promise of America – the promise that, with hard work, a person could build a good life – isn’t being kept for too many people.

That was the central argument to Donald Trump’s surprisingly successful 2016 campaign. He spoke to the frustrations, even anguish, of largely rural, overwhelmingly white working-class Americans who felt the dream slipping through their fingers and out of their grasp.

His was an outsider’s crusade, not a traditional political campaign. He was less a candidate than a rebel chieftain storming the gates of the castle, demanding not just a seat at the table but the throne itself.

His victory was even more startling because it involved overthrowing not just one but two establishments.

First, he took down the GOP hierarchy, throwing well-heeled and well-educated Republicans who always know which fork to use when dining into a kind of panicked tizzy from which they have yet to recover.

Then he tossed Washington, D.C., upside down, discarding well-established precedents, practices and rules as if they were used and useless fast-food hamburger wrappers.

Chaos ensued – and normal, even simple functions of government became much more difficult.

In some cases, even impossible.

But that doesn’t disturb the president’s ardent supporters.

They seem happy to see someone take a wrecking ball to the machinery of self-government because they believe the system isn’t working for them.

Flash forward to now.

If the Democratic presidential debates a few days ago demonstrated anything, it was that the dissatisfaction with the system isn’t confined to white working-class America.

Consider many of the candidates who have emerged from nowhere as serious contenders in the race to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer. All represent constituencies that have reason to feel disenchanted, dispossessed and disenfranchised. And all their candidacies would have been unimaginable 15 years ago.

Kamala Harris is a first-term senator from California and a black woman. Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of a smallish Midwestern city and a gay man who speaks often of his husband. Elizabeth Warren is a senator from Massachusetts, a former law school professor and schoolteacher who was Republican until she was nearly 50. Julian Castro is a former Cabinet member, a former San Antonio mayor and a man of Mexican ancestry. Cory Booker is a senator from New Jersey, a former mayor of Newark and an African-American man.

Like Trump, all these candidates are, to say the least, non-traditional.

And, like Trump, a large part of their message and their appeal is that they don’t represent the old system.

In some ways, the emergence of these outsider candidates shouldn’t be surprising. Almost every successful presidential contender since Jimmy Carter has won by running against Washington and claiming to be the one who can bring sweeping change to a moribund system and culture.

But what’s different now is that many of the old barriers preventing outsider candidates from breaching the walls of power have been swept away.

Race was one such barrier. Gender was another. Sexual orientation was still another. Non-European ancestry could be yet another.

It’s not that people who weren’t white, male, straight and of European ancestry didn’t want power or at least what they considered a fair shake. It’s just that the system wasn’t set up to allow them to pursue their ambitions.

That’s no longer the case.

The election first of Barack Obama and then Donald Trump to the White House demonstrates that many Americans who had no realistic prospect of being president can imagine hearing “Hail to the Chief” every time they enter a room.

More to the point, the people they represent now have ways to express their dissatisfaction with a system that excludes many and rewards relatively few. They have a way to make their voices heard.

The irony, a painful one, is that the Trump supporters and the people who back the non-traditional candidates on the Democratic side might learn something if they lowered their voices.

Namely, that they have a lot in common.

They’re all unhappy and they all want things to change.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.