America’s embattled middle class doesn’t want charts and graphs facts and statistics. It wants a leader who will identity culprits and take ruthless action. It’s a different electorate than I remember. My business partner in the late 1980s the supply-sider Jude Wanniski liked to say that the American people in its wisdom wanted a nice guy as president. They knew that the American president was the most powerful man in the world and if he acted out of rancor the consequences could be terrible. Not any more. Americans want a nasty president.

Reductio ad Hitlerum is a bad sort of argument as Leo Strauss used to say but there are exceptions to every rule. There is a touch of Weimar in the air. The Germans of the 1920s didn’t understand why they were impoverished and humiliated. Germany was Europe’s fastest-growing economy before World War I its center of innovation its greatest military power. How could it have lost the war swallowed painful reparations payments and given up huge swaths of its territory? The Germans were in a mean mood and they wanted the nastiest attack dog in politics. Hitler accomodated them. Even worse the German Establishment led by Franz von Papen thought it could use Hitler and invited him to form a government in January 1933.

We’re a long way from Germany in the late 1920s to be sure but the parallels are disturbing. The Republican Establishment shouts from the rooftops that it prefers Hitl– er Trump to the horrible Ted Cruz. As Bob Dole put itTrump could “probably work with Congress because he’s you know he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.” Robert Costa at the Washington PostDavid French at National Review Paul Mirengoff at Powerline and other commentators too numerous to mention have weighed in on the same theme.

Why does the Establishment hate Cruz so much? He threatens their livelihood unlike Trump whose real estate and casino business has required friendly dealings with politicians of all stripes for half a century. Permit me an anecdote: a couple of years ago I attended the annual dinner of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs where I was then a Fellow and had the honor to sit next to Allen West. Col. West had just lost his Congressional seat in Florida to a massive Democratic campaign to dislodge him. We were discussing supply-side economics. Sen. Lindsey Graham sauntered over and flashed a smile with more teeth than a Great White. West and I stood up. I told Sen. Graham “We should make this man president.” Graham showed even more teeth and declared “First we’re going to make him rich.”

The Amerian economy is cartelized and monopolized to an extent we haven’t seen in two generations. Why is this so-called economic recovery so miserable? The entrepreneurs are gone. In all previous postwar recoveries new businesses led employment growth. This time around companies in the S&P 500 accounted for virtually all of the employment growth. Almost half the job recovery since 2009 involves flipping burgers and emptying bed pans. New companies aren’t creating jobs. Facebook has 10000 employees. McDonalds has 440000.

Corporate America wanted nothing to do with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Not a single Fortune 500 CEO backed him–all of them supported George H. W. Bush or John Connally in the primaries. When informedof this (Jude Wanniski who was at the meeting told me) Reagan said that he didn’t need them–he would be the candidate of the entrepreneur the small businessman the farmer the workingman. Cruz wants to be Reagan redux. The Establishment remembers Reagan; in particular it remembers that the corporate powers-that-be of 1980 were dwarfed by the entrepreneurial newcomes whom the Reagan reforms unleashed. It didn’t like Reagan the first time and the last thing it wants is a younger incarnation of him.

Without a return to entrepreneurship America’s economy will stagnate and America’s middle class will continue to lose ground. Donald Trump represents the triumph of resentment over hope. I don’t know what American voters will do. But I’m frightened.