How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen

From Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage. 

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. 

(Regarding Angela Merkel and her co-conspirators in giving Germany away): 

Nothing in their lives will get worse. 

The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street--that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending--because nobody cares about them enough to stop it. 

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. 

When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” 

The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.” ... 

The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. 

At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling. ... 

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.