Making a Separate Peace

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds quotes at length a Peggy Noonan Wall Street Journal column from 2005, sadly behind their paywall, about how our elites have tried to ignore the mess we're in.

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. (snip) I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

Many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

There's more than a hint of roman a clef in this column. Peggy should have written "that's what a lot of us elites are up to" as she's a member of that elite, a green-room schmoozer. Eleven years later the hoi polloi sense the disconnect, hence Trump and Brexit.