Many of us (probably anyone reading this) has a sense that the political leaders of the West see themselves as representing the world rather than the people of the nation that elected them, and they actually look with distaste upon their own people. (This is a large part of Trump's appeal: A candidate who condemns this behavior in others, and promises to speak for the forgotten American people.) In this article, Peggy Noonan seeks to understand and explain how and why our leadership has turned its back on us.
Opening line: 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.
