A New Class Warfare

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, writes a weekly column for USA Today. Five months ago, Reynolds pointed out much of the acrimony in modern politics is a new kind of class warfare, of which the Donald Trump presidency is a symptom.

It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

If you look at the “yellow jacket” protests in France, the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and events in places like Italy and Hungary — or, for that matter, the Brexit movement in Britain — you find a similar unhappiness with institutional arrangements and the sleek and self-satisfied elites who benefit from them.

Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.

I like his reasoning here, it feels right and explains much. Read the whole thing.