Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.
Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday about the confusion of the elites in the political arena, who can’t understand why Donald Trump is so popular, why there is such a strong movement of support for his Presidential candidacy in the U.S. She describes them as the “Protected” ones, and the rest of us, the ones who support Trump as the “Unprotected”.
Protected and unprotected is a good way to describe it. And the rise of the vulgarians (the unprotected) – in large part aided by the internet – has moved at an accelerated pace. The “common” people will not be silenced, and they are no longer isolated.
We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
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.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
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.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
Stella's Place 
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
That final line is dumb. Of course they don’t know. It’s what the article was about, basically. One could argue that they know and don’t care, but that is clearly not true. They are pooping in their pants and doing everything wrong to stop Trump because they do not grasp that we are truly not going to let them disenfranchise us.
There will be blood.
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The smart ones are bowing to the inevitable, and vowing to support Trump, if not enthusiastically.
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There is nothing new under the sun. They don’t know. It never crossed their minds. They don’t think in the first place to have something cross their minds.
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The funny part is that Noonan appears to not realize she is part of the protected class or at the very least her readers do not recognize her as such.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
Really is Jimmy a friend or someone who repairs shoes for her?
Noonan deflected ? I suspect Jimmy recognized this arrogant move and was put off by it. Why does Noonan think she gets to deflect, why does she think she gets to direct the conversation rather than simply answer honestly? Because Noonan sees Jimmy as barometer not a “friend.”
I think what Noonan saw flash across Jimmy’s face was not “impatience” it was recognition that Noonan is the protected and that she was once again hoodwinking Jimmy.
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Yes, Noonan is a member of the protected class, but I think she knows it. There are different types of “protected” people. Noonan lives in New York, so she’s certainly a product of her environment, but you could say the same about Donald Trump, couldn’t you? He’s hardly friends with his shoe repairman, he has his own personal body guards, his kids went to private schools, he has his own personal airplane and pilot, chauffeur(s) and limousine(s).
Does that make Donald Trump a bad person, or an unaware person? Or does it just make him a rich person, who lives differently than we do?
I’m not really friends with the local shoe repair person, but I am friendly and could ask questions, as she did. I imagine she’s more like me than not, and I don’t think that her shoe repair guy, Jimmy, sees her as “arrogant”, any more than my repair guy sees me that way. Why should he, unless he thinks he’s part of some oppressed class. It’s obvious that Jimmy doesn’t think Donald Trump is “arrogant”.
I believe that Jonah Goldberg etal are the ones she is talking about in the political media, and the GOPe in D.C.
I think Peggy “gets it”, although she will never be like you or me. Peggy is a New York/D.C. conservative, but I don’t equate Peggy with journalists on the other side, just like I don’t put James Taranto or some of the other conservative commentators in that category.
I think it’s important not to throw out the baby with the bath water. If she gets it, I’m open to listen to what she has to say. I’ve always admired her writing, although I haven’t always agreed with what she has to say.
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I’m not throwing the baby out with the bath water just recognizing what Noonan did not acknowledge that she is a beneficiary of being a member of the protected class. Trump acknowledges his status, even embraces it.
Being part of the protected class does not make anyone a bad person. Demanding the unprotected suffer the yoke of the protected class is what makes some of the protected class bad people. I think that is the gist of Noonan’s article.
Perhaps I am more cynical than you, although I don’t equate Noonan with the likes of Huffington or even George Will, I do think she is being disingenuous when she deflects and thinks her “friend” the shoe repairer, is too dopey to see through her trying to herd him and I think she is being disingenuous when she speaks of the protected class as something separate from herself.
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Having read her for years, I don’t think she’s arrogant at all, and I imagine she could actually be friends, or at least friendly, with her local shoe repairer. After all, why not?
I don’t see the point of coming down hard on any writer when they tend to say things that I agree with. I’ll make it as easy for that person – who has a bigger megaphone than I do – as I can to say the right thing, and praise them for doing so.
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We will have to agree to disagree. I believe what Noonan said is true, I believe we all, myself included always need to be introspective, I don’t think Noonan’s article shows any introspection. I think that good people can still get stuck.
Jonah Goldberg has made a pretty good living by stating the obvious, I was just trying to make a simple observation that Noonan is writing as if she is not part of the protected class and that to me is a problem. That doesn’t mean I stop respecting Noonan’s great contribution to our country or conservative values.
Noonan ends her essay with this I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it. To which I would answer, Peggy you should easily be able to answer that question.
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I liked her Christmas column from last December. Reminds me of my own childhood.
http://www.peggynoonan.com/in-celebration-of-modest-christmases-past/
I saved all of her columns from after 9/11/2001. I’m not sure they are even available now, but they were, and are, worth saving.
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I agree, Menagerie. Sadly.
There will be blood. I hope we can avoid the 21st century equivalent of the guillotine.
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Good read Stella, thanks. And in regards to that last line, I don’t believe they know how serious this is. Jeb’s, and now Marco’s very adamant declarations that Trump WILL NOT be the nominee, lead me to conclude that they believe they have it handled. They do not care.
If their lives, and their children’s lives were impacted the same as ours, then they would care. But the author states it correctly, they feel above, protected. And I agree with the assessment that Trump’s allure is that we are finally being offered protection. It has been a long time coming.
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Sundance just did a post on GOPe strategy. It’s interesting too.
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Thanks, just getting caught up, long busy day. Missed breakfast even. I will head over and check.
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Stella, did you purposefully choose that picture to see if anyone noticed? No one has come forward to identify who was at the rally with the CTH sign.If it was me, I’d shout it from the rooftop! Sundance, perhaps?
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I chose that pic because I like it, and it represents the unprotected among our closest associates who are rising against the protected class.
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Just read previous post! I’ve figured it out! My lips are sealed!!!!!
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Who is it?
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BMT?
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