By Selwyn Duke

"The elite are not the problem right now; the people are,” said German president Joachim Gauck, responding to the Brexit vote in June. His comment perhaps reflected an old division with a new twist. The division is the Elite vs. the Street. And the twist, writes columnist Peggy Noonan in a much-read article, is “a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.”

In “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen,” Noonan opines that those “in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage.” The writer mentions how she recently had a conversation with an acquaintance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel about “the issue” that largely inspired the U.K.’s “Brexit”: the mass migration of Muslims into Europe, the Merkel brainchild that has birthed crime, social upheaval, and citizen unrest. Noonan says that the German leader appears “uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house.” This observation, she continued, prompted the acquaintance to sigh and agree, for it’s “one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals.”

The problem, as someone close to me once profoundly put it, is that it’s easy to be idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals.

Read the rest here.