It is almost unbelievable that the same country that 8 years ago elected the first African-American president in its history full of hope and re-elected him -certainly with less enthusiasm- 4 years ago for a second term, has elected someone diametrically opposed to replace Barack Obama and has done so full of fear and indignation.

Obama won the confidence of Americans by appealing to hope(Hope!) in a possible change(Yes, we can!) and generated a wave of optimism in the United States and around the world that now seems unjustified: no single man, not even the president of the most powerful country on Earth, can change everything for the better. Obama found it harder than expected to win his second presidential election precisely because of the expectations generated in his first election campaign. The president himself later commented that his campaign slogan should have been " Yes, we can but...".

Barack Obama has not been a bad president, at least if we judge the macroeconomic figures of the country, the data of employment, or the effort to extend health and social benefits to those who lacked them(Medicare and Medicaid). However, during his two terms in office, the differences between rich and poor have not diminished, but quite the opposite: never before has the American class average been so diminished as it is now. Likewise, Obama's presidency has fallen far short of the expectations he had generated around the world with regard to armed conflicts and the role of the USA in the world concert. In general terms, it can be said that the legacy left by Obama to his successor as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate has been good. Why has Clinton not been able to revalidate the Presidency for the Democrats?

It was known beforehand that, despite his hardly improvable credentials, he did not arouse enthusiasm among potential Democratic voters. Last summer, filmmaker Michael Moore - not at all suspected of being close to the Republicans - predicted Donald Trump's victory, among other things due to the unpopularity of Hilary Clinton, who perfectly embodies what in our country we would call the caste, the professional politicians whose disconnection with the real problems of the people is total. Here is, in my opinion, the real reason for Hilary Clinton's failure: the disaffection towards the political class or, even more, the weariness towards the political class .

This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it exclusively American. In 2008, without going any further, several colleagues from department of Public Communication of the University of Navarra, in the book What do we think in Navarra about our politicians? explained this issue with data of the Comunidad Foral. The perception that politicians are part of the problem and not part of the solution is nowadays currency in practically all Western democracies, including the United States. Obama was probably the first to realize that citizens needed hope, project, leadership, because the feeling of being fed up was already very strong in 2008. Hope was a magic word. But Obama has not been able to fulfill the hopes that people had, or at least not to the extent that was desired, and hope has turned into frustration. And frustration into fear. And fear into a breeding ground for populists with simplistic and impossible recipes for very complex problems. If Barack Obama became president by appealing to hope, Donald Trump has done so by appealing to the frustration that generates fear: fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, fear of Europeans, fear of free trade agreements. An irrational fear of everything that is distant and that serves to explain the frustration generated by the disenchantment with the politicians of "the system", Obama among them.

Trump, who is not a politician but a businessman who has made his name on television has exploited that frustration with the system and with politicians and that fear of the unknown. And the voters have bought his outrageous and simplistic speech . I do not believe that this frustration will be solved with his recipes, but it is worth learning the lesson: people's anger, their disenchantment with politics, is not something to which the rulers should remain oblivious, because this anger, on the one hand, ends up removing them from power (which is not in itself bad); and on the other hand, submission the government to others who, most likely, will endanger democratic coexistence. And this is really bad.