They gaze out from their Ivy League casements and Hollywood balconies on a Hobbesian hinterland of racists, bigots and fools, fed a diet of “misinformation” by right-wing media. From those secure perches they don’t see people who feel betrayed at home and abroad by successive leaders, American communities battling devastating health and financial crises, workers whose incomes have struggled to keep pace with costs, parents who fear their children’s lives will be worse—all told by a modern aristocracy that their American values are wicked, that people from other countries who have no legal right even to be here are entitled to the same privileges, even when they commit
violent crimes.