5 Surprising Truths About America's 'Common Sense' Revolution

In three elections, Donald Trump improved the Republican vote share in 1,500 American counties. Democrats improved theirs in just 57—almost all of them the nation’s wealthiest. According to conservative analyst Scott Jennings, this isn’t a polling anomaly; it’s evidence of a fundamental “Revolution of Common Sense” that is reordering American politics along lines of class, not party.

Jennings, a veteran political commentator, offers a framework for understanding this phenomenon, one he pitched directly to Trump in the Oval Office. He argued that the former president was on the brink of revolutionizing not just campaigning, but governing itself. The result of that conversation is his forthcoming book, A Revolution of Common Sense: How Donald Trump Stormed into Washington and Fought for Western Civilization (due November 18, 2025), which diagnoses a populist uprising born from a deep-seated belief that America’s expert class has failed.

This article distills five of the most impactful and counter-intuitive takeaways from Jennings' analysis. These ideas provide a crucial lens for understanding the forces challenging the country’s core institutions from the ground up.

1. The Great Realignment Isn't About Party—It's About Class

In Jennings’ framework, the defining political divide in America is no longer a simple contest between Republicans and Democrats. Instead, it is a class divide pitting working-class voters of all backgrounds against a disconnected and insular elite.

This "elite failure" stems from the concentration of power within key institutions—media, academia, and government—that have become echo chambers. Jennings diagnoses the problem with journalistic precision: "The people explaining America to itself increasingly live in the same places. They went to the same schools. They talk only to each other. They hire each other. They marry each other." This groupthink, he argues, creates a chasm between the country’s leadership and the people they claim to represent. When a political earthquake takes the establishment by surprise, the fault lies not with the voters, but with the leaders who stopped paying attention.

"When the entire establishment gets blindsided... it's not because the voters are irrational. It's because the establishment has stopped listening to them."

This class-based framework offers a more powerful explanation for recent political shifts than traditional party-line analysis, suggesting that the populist energy reshaping American politics is rooted in a deep sense that the system is rigged for insiders.

2. The Pandemic Was the Moment "Something Snapped"

This growing class divide, Jennings argues, might have remained a simmering resentment if not for a singular event that threw it into stark relief: the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn't just a health crisis; it was a crisis of authority that exposed every institutional failure and hypocrisy at once, permanently altering many Americans' relationship with their leaders.

The source of this breakdown was a set of rules that seemed to apply only to regular people. Small businesses were forced to close while big-box stores stayed open. Churches were shuttered while casinos and liquor stores operated freely. The governor of California dined at the luxurious French Laundry while citizens were ordered home. All this occurred alongside what Jennings calls "one of the largest upward transfers of wealth in American history."

While European countries reopened their schools by May 2020, many in the U.S. remained closed through 2021, resulting in what Jennings identifies as "the largest learning loss in American history," with math and reading scores dropping to "levels unseen for decades" and a tragic rise in child abuse, drug abuse, and suicide rates. For millions, the constant admonitions felt less like guidance and more like a demand for blind obedience.

"And I think that is when something snapped. People realized that follow the science actually meant follow the politics. That expert opinion meant shut up and comply."

This experience, Jennings argues, shattered the credibility of experts and fueled a populist skepticism that now sees establishment pronouncements not as objective truth, but as another form of political control.

3. The Real Opposition Wasn't Political—It Was "Lawfare"

Having lost credibility through its pandemic-era mandates, the establishment, in Jennings' view, couldn't rely on persuasion to counter Trump. Instead, it turned to coercion, unleashing what he calls "lawfare"—a strategy to delegitimize and remove a political opponent through the justice system rather than at the ballot box. This strategy, Jennings contends, manifested in two primary forms.

The first was the "Russia hoax," which he describes as the "largest disinformation op in the last 50 years" and a "spy op on us." He argues that intelligence officials went on television, using their security clearances to "intimate to the American people that they know something you don't know" in a coordinated effort to delegitimize Trump's presidency from the start.

The second involves the legal cases in New York, which Jennings frames as politically motivated actions by partisan prosecutors like Letitia James, who campaigned on the explicit promise to "go after Donald Trump." He points to the mechanics of the Alvin Bragg case, where a time-barred misdemeanor was controversially elevated to a felony based on a superseding federal crime that federal prosecutors themselves had already declined to charge. These tactics, he believes, ultimately backfired, turning Trump into a martyr and revealing a profound weakness within the Democratic party.

"The entire project... it actually revealed an extreme lack of confidence among Democrats in their own ability to win an election. They thought the only way to win was to take him out legally."

This analysis recasts many of the major legal battles of the last few years not as standard judicial procedure, but as a political war fought by other means.

4. Populism's Goal Isn't to "Burn It All Down"—It's to Rebuild

Populism is often stereotyped as a purely destructive force, fueled by anger and a desire to tear down existing structures. Jennings challenges this view, arguing for a "smart populism" or "common sense" movement that is focused on reform and construction, not just rage. He believes that identifying corrupt institutions is the easy part; the harder but more essential task is building better ones.

He outlines a three-part vision for what this constructive populism looks like in practice:

1. Competition for failed institutions: Rather than trying to seize control of legacy media or universities, populists should build their own. This means supporting independent journalists, creating new educational models, and developing parallel platforms that can challenge the dominance of the old guard.
2. Relocalize power: The populist instinct is that Washington cannot and should not solve every problem. Jennings argues for shifting power back to the local level, asserting that city councils, school boards, and county sheriffs are often better equipped to handle local issues than a distant federal bureaucracy.
3. Rebuild social trust: Grand national pronouncements cannot fix a low-trust society. Instead, trust is rebuilt through millions of small, local interactions between neighbors who may vote differently but understand they share a common destiny.

This vision presents a more hopeful and pragmatic path forward for the populist movement—one that channels popular energy into lasting change rather than temporary satisfaction.

5. The Stakes Are Higher Than an Election—It's the "Future of Western Civilization"

Beyond the daily political ping-pong, Jennings frames the current moment in stark, existential terms. For him, the battles over policy and elections are secondary to a much larger conflict: the fight for the survival of Western civilization itself.

This is not a traditional political struggle but a cultural one to defend core values like free speech, tradition, and the American way of life against internal decay. This existential threat is grounded in tangible fears about "an American future where you can't say what you want to say" and where "economic opportunities don't afford you the chance to live what you would consider to be an American dream." Defending these principles, he argues, is a core responsibility of the presidency that transcends routine governance.

"We're actually in a fight for the future of Western civilization... if we don't win that fight we won't be around to argue about tariffs or anything else."

He connects this directly to global events, passionately framing the defense of Israel as "the central front in the fight for the future of Western civilization." This perspective elevates domestic American politics onto a global stage, casting the "common sense revolution" as a crucial part of a much larger ideological contest.

Conclusion: A Hinge Moment for America

Taken together, Scott Jennings' analysis portrays a nation at a profound "hinge moment." A populist, "common sense" realignment is not just challenging the political parties but fundamentally reshaping America's core institutions from the ground up. It is a movement born from a deep-seated belief that the experts have failed, the system is rigged, and that regular people must reclaim control.

As this revolution continues, its success will ultimately be measured not by what it tears down, but by what it has the vision and discipline to build in its place.

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