Thirty years ago, most Americans felt they could, to some degree, relate to the people who ruled over them. The politicians did not tool around in armored vehicles or have armed men in mirrored sunglasses guarding them. The so-called “public servants” were not highly compensated, even if they did not work hard. The members of the commentariat were few in number and they worked hard to present themselves as normal people. There was a gap, for sure, but it did not feel like a huge gap.

A lot has changed and today it feels to most people like we have been colonized by pod people from another planet. They sort of look like us and make familiar noises, but they are not us. They are alien. Every day they say things that suggest they are just visiting our planet. President Obama makes the sort of “gaffes” a person makes when they have been trained to sound like a person, but maybe did not pay strict attention in human class. Hillary Clinton often sounds like a stroke victim learning to talk again.

Today, of course, there is an army of chattering skulls, experts and commenters we see on TV and on-line. Unless you live in one of the guarded combines around Washington or in a swank building in Manhattan, you will never run into these people on the street. They live apart from the rest of us. That is why they sound like graduate students on an anthropology study. They peer out at us and then describe to each other what they think is happening. To them, we are just talking monkeys in a game park.

The foreignness Americans now feel toward their rulers is rather weak compared to the alienation the rulers feel toward the people. Decades of telling each other scary stories about racist, misogynistic and bigoted Americans has left most of them fearful of normal Americans. The universal response from both the Left and the so-called Right, to the rise of Trump, has been to compete with one another for who can produce the vilest epithet they can fling at the Trump voter.

Some elements of the ruling class still think they just need to adjust some settings in the enclosures and things will calm down. They write long letters to one another about “connectedness” and how Trump is really just leading a rear guard action of losers and misfits. When that gets boring, it’s back to telling campfire stories about how Hitler has come back from the dead and is organizing the Final Final Solution on twitter. Listen to the mainstream press and you would think the streets are teaming with skinheads, brown shirts and Klansman.

If you are a normal person, you can’t help but feel like an alien in your own country when you see stuff like this on twitter. A normal person at a Trump rally is set upon by a mob and our so-called betters howl with approval. All those lectures we used to hear from the ruling class about free speech and protest being the highest form of patriotism suddenly ring a little hollow. So-called conservatives care more about democracy in Iraq than in America. The liberals care more about the foreign invaders than the safety of Americans.

This great divide that has opened up between the ruling classes and the people is largely the result of globalism. The source of the great fortunes is no longer tied to countries or cultures. Global money bankrolls government and the petty royalty that lives off government. The result is the people in charge have divorced themselves from the people over whom they rule. The Cloud People define themselves by their opposition to and essential difference from the Dirt People.

Over the last few decades as this has evolved, it was one big party for the government class. No matter which party won the election, the money still poured into the Imperial Capital to finance the petty royalty that lives in the suburbs around the city. Six of the ten richest counties in America are connected to DC. Two are outside the financial capital of the world, New York City. Good times or bad, the last three decades has seen their wealth and prosperity grow.

For the people in charge, particularly the commentariat, the American people have become the Umman Manda. These were people who poured south into Mesopotamia in the second century BC. The name, depending upon the source, means “the horde from who knows where” or, and my favorite, “the scourge of the gods.” To the people peeking at us through the windows of their car services and telescopes, the public is just a formless mass of savages that threaten the established order. It is why they hate what is happening. It is why they will stop at nothing to end it.