Glen Reynolds quoting Peggy Noonan, who hates the term elite, because the New Amsterdam Slimes, for which she works, is the journal of record for the elite.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that. . . . You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

As I keep saying, we have the worst political class in American history. And people have noticed. There’s no particular reason why the outcome must be good. Bismarck said that God looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America, but as Jerry Pournelle noted: “Of course we were a much more devout nation” when Bismarck made that observation.

Jerry Pournelle, who has observed the USA political system far longer and far closer than I do, notes:

From here on in, it’s the matter of Trump. You may be for him or against him; but he is a serious contender. I do not think he really wants to be saddled with the pressure of the duties of President; but more and more turn to him to save what they think is America. This is the rise of pragmatic populism. There is something Jacksonian in his rise.

This could all happen peaceably (despite race hucksters saying they will leave the USA if Trump wins: I suggest they join their comrade Mugabe in Zimbabwe) in the USA. It could happen peaceably in the UK.

But in France, with a large Muslim immigrant population and an unprotected Catholic majority? Or Germany? Or Sweden? Or Spain? Less likely. The EU cannot be voted out. It will either be shattered or there will be blood on the street. For the unprotected want protection, and will turn, if not to a moderate such as Trump. to a tyrant such as Putin.

UPDATE

Pournelle elaborates. His level of enthusiasm for Rubio is shared by Vox.

We are down to effectively three viable Republican candidates; we have allowed Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, actually a minority of votes within those not large states, to restrict to three who can be President. If this was supposed to promote Democracy and restrict the power of those in smoke-filled rooms, it may have restricted the cigar smoking flip drinkers, but it hardly promotes Democracy. A better way was when, instead of primaries, party activists such as precinct committee leaders named delegates to a national convention. Yes, that produced Barry Goldwater one year, and this terrified the Rockefeller Republicans; and of course Kennedy used primaries to good advantage. And aren’t primaries democratic? Why consult precinct workers on whom their party will nominate? But that’s a topic for another time.

In effect we have Trump, Cruz, and Marco Rubio, and one of them will win. That probably means Rubio as Cruz will attack Trump, Trump will probably respond quite effectively, and Rubio stays out of the line of fire as the other two kill each other; at least that’s the nightmare I have. And I could be very wrong: one of the most astute politicians alive, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, says that Trump has learned faster than anyone he has ever seen, and continues to do so.

I value Newt’s judgment highly; and while he has not formally endorsed Trump, he has named the populist pragmatist a viable and interesting candidate. And note that Trump was the first to say that Scalia must be succeeded by another original intent constitutionalist – indeed was the first to say so. This is not the move of a candidate for emperor.