Why We’re Ungovernable: The “Unprotected” Push Back, by John Rubino:

Peggy Noonan, former Reagan administration speech writer and current Wall Street Journal pundit has, like most of her peers, been wondering what’s gotten into the unwashed masses lately that makes them such unpredictable voters.

And she’s come up with a useful conclusion: The rise of Donald Trump (and similar iconoclasts in other countries) is due to the gradual division of society into the protected — that is, people who make the rules and therefore benefit from them — and the unprotected, who don’t make the rules and end up getting screwed. The latter have finally figured this out and have stopped supporting the former.

From Noonan’s WSJ piece (quoted here in its entirety):

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.

Rubino then extends Noonan’s observation to the all-important financial sphere, which our political commentators only dimly grasp:

Governments and other protected classes have borrowed unmanageable amounts of money and are now maintaining their power by squeezing workers and savers. Corporations lower their costs by shipping jobs overseas while governments cut their debt service by reducing (or eliminating) interest rates on the bank accounts and bond funds that once allowed savers to build capital and retirees to eat.

In this sense, QE, ZIRP and NIRP [quantitative easing, zero and negative interest rate policies] are a declaration of war on the unprotected, and as the victims figure this out they’re lining up behind anyone who promises to 1) raise the minimum wage, limit immigration, and prevent corporations from moving jobs overseas; 2) break up big banks and jail Wall Street criminals; 3) hand out free stuff, paid for by confiscating the ill-gotten gains of the 1%.