The Best Reader Comments: The True Meaning of Joel Kotkin's 'Localism'

Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory last week has many hydra-headed explanations, with no shortage of pundits with perfect hindsight to proffer them. Joel Kotkin, the author and Chapman University geographer, thinks he has part of the answer: A strong distaste for the federal power exercised by President Obama activated an element of Trump supporters that many underestimated. ”If you put all your faith in an administrative executive dictatorship,” Kotkin writes in an email, “sometimes things break a different way than you expect.”