When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Viewing the after action reports on cable news and on-line, I can’t get past the fact that the chattering class remains thoroughly perplexed by what they are seeing. The script says they are supposed to coo over Farina and her poll numbers will soar. Then they will put on the serious face and tell us why one of the dwarfs is the only sober choice. The dwarf will win the nomination and they will all live happily ever after.

Instead, it’s as if someone has removed the CPU from the robot. Rather than working as expected, it is running amok, smashing up everything and threatening to kill the soft graceful people who inhabit the world of the chattering classes. The only thing missing from these reports on Trump is to have the chattering skulls huddling together as they read from the prompter.

Part of what we’re seeing is the chasm between the managerial class and the rest of us. The folks on TV or writing for the mainstream sites imagine they have a good bead on things. After all, they read each others blogs, books and columns. They talk to all the smart people that traipse through the studios. They even send foreign correspondents out to places like Cleveland and Denver to report on what’s happening out there, beyond the perimeter.

Another part is that they are programmed to think that politics is simply a fight between the two sides of the ruling class. Their bosses engage in ritualized combat over who gets to be in charge for a while. Instead of fielding champions to battle it out in the pit, they give each other tongue lashings on TV. The peanut gallery still gets to give the kill sign, but it really does not matter who wins as they largely agree on everything anyway.

That’s what is so confusing to them. Most of these people are simply unaware of the vast body of opinion outside the their bubble. They have this huge blind spot that the rest of us call reality. The chattering classes don’t get the Trump Effect because it’s not supposed to exist. In fact, it can’t exist. Contemplating it is on par with noodling over the existence of magical elves riding unicorns.

What we’re seeing on TV and the Interwebs is just the glitter path. There’s a huge chasm between the ruling class of American society and those over whom they rule. It’s not simply a disagreement over the direction of society. In many respects, the duty of the ruling class is to guide their subjects to the right policies. In a sane society, the people in charge are smarter and more knowledgeable so they better be more right than the masses.

No, the dispute today is over the nature of society and it is an irreconcilable dispute. The ruling class of today imagines a world that does not include a thriving, rambunctious middle class that participates in the decision making. They imagine a world that looks a lot like feudalism, where  the people are kept, like pets or farm animals. It’s a world that cannot accommodate the English speaking world’s idea of a citizen.

The choice before us is a simple one. Either the ruling class gets a new people or the people get a new ruling class. The ruling class, to their credit, have figured this out a long time ago. Mark Zuckerburglar is not spending millions to thwart reform efforts because he is a greed-head. It is an article of faith among the billionaire class that their survival depends on ending the concept of citizenship and that’s best achieved with open borders and mass migration.

The people may be finally catching on and that’s why patriotic parties are rising up in Europe while America is having Trump-a-paloosa. The people supporting these efforts are committed to working within their traditional processes. That means winning elections, passing new laws and reforming the ruling class. The people supporting Trump are not ready to cross the Rubicon and have a boiled rope party – yet.

Social reform works when the people in charge are driving the reform. There are no examples of successful reform movements that were not supported by some elements of the ruling elite. That’s important to keep in mind when analyzing what’s happening in the West. Similarly, most bottom-up reform movements have been crushed by the people in charge. The exceptions are those that ended in revolution.

The other night, one of the dwarfs quoted Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”  This was in reference to the civil disobedience over homosexual marriage.

The irony, of course, was lost on all of them. In that letter, King was making a point to the white ruling class of the South. That point was this. They could either negotiate with King and dismantle the legal discrimination or they could deal with the mobs in the streets. King was betting that they lacked the stomach to open fire on the mob, which meant they had only one way out.

Donald Trump is not Martin Luther King and there are no mobs in the street yet, but the situation facing the ruling elite is the same. The ruling class has been slowly diluting the value of citizenship by extending the benefits to millions of non-citizens. The hope was that sentimentality or fear would keep people from noticing. That’s no longer the case. People have noticed. From here, the ball can only roll down hill one way.