American Idiot also had it's 20th anniversary, I ordered the CD/bluray box set that comes out later this month.
The gap between Dookie and American Idiot seems significantly longer to me than the gap between American Idiot and today, yet it's half as long :/
Related: it sure seemed like the mid-90s were special for rock music; I was 13 when Dookie came out and I felt (still feel) like I was in a sort of alternative renaissance, just crammed with amazing new music. But I’m sure every generation feels that way about whatever happened to be popular when they were teenagers.
1) Positions and messaging strategy. Trump tends to take up the positions you hear Republican voters talk about over a coffee at the diner or over a beer on an aluminum-hull outboard motor fishing boat. As with Democrats, typical Republican planks aren’t terribly close to what their voters want, so (Trump proved) you can win elections by targeting this unmet demand directly.
“Why don’t they just build a wall?”; “Fucking NAFTA, sold us all out”; “gotta do something about that trade deficit with China” and/or other comments on restricting trade with China; “Obamacare sucks” but also kinda vaguely supporting something to fix healthcare (this muddled set of positions came out rather directly in Trump’s speeches—sometimes it’d sound like he was about to advocate single payer); “we should stop being the world police for free” and/or “Europe’s freeloading on NATO”; lots of complaints about illegal immigration’s and crime generally; Washington corruption (“drain the swamp!”); et c.
If you know many Republican voters, not politicians, you may recognize that as stuff that’d inform their wishlist. Trump heard that, and just… did exactly that, turned around and said exactly those things instead of taking up the typical Republican platform. Got him elected. He even sort-of followed through on some of it. This is true for at least the first election, his positions this time seem to have gone a bit more tail-wagging-the-dog (creating issues and demand for a particular solution to the created issue, through messaging, rather than going to where voters already are on existing issues)
2) Relatedly, and especially because he did follow through on some of it, he’s the only big two party Presidential candidate since perhaps 1980 to not be fully on-board with neoliberalism. That’s definitely remarkable. Vance alluded to this at one point in the recent debate.
(Disclaimer because it’s a polarizing topic: observation without condemnation should not be taken as support)
That's really not how I see it. Trump sits on the shoulders of those who came before and set the stage for the Trump policy. My Alito example above is an instructive one. Bush can be seen as laying a 20 year foundation towards overturning Roe or the Chevron doctrine. I remember when Roberts was appointed, mainstream press talked up how moderate and reasonable he was, but I never bought it -- and how we see he isn't.
The rhetoric appeals to the base... But that base got radicalized by prior eras. Decades of complaining about big government. Fox News demonizing Pelosi and "San Francisco values". Karl Rove's permanent campaign mode. Much of that discourse was fully formed in 2004. The Bush people knew to reign it in sometimes, that is the difference.
All of these has been fueled by social media, which to reduce some of the complexities, determined that "if we divide and polarize american politics we make boatloads of money"