When rulers despise the ruled: It’s like The Hunger Games: the Capital City, and its hangers-on, flourish, while the provinces starve, by Glenn Reynolds.

Global elites, Peggy Noonan notes, no longer seem to care about their countrymen. They’ve cashed out into a separate world, where consequences don’t apply to them, and where loyalty to other members of the global elite outweighs such petty concerns as patriotism or loyalty to one’s fellow-citizens. …

In the United States, Noonan notes, Syrian refugees are being placed in the poorest communities — not the rich suburbs in northern Virginia or Maryland where the powerful people who run the government live, but in communities already facing problems that they’re barely dealing with. …

Not long ago, people were asking if Facebook could swing an election. Now we hear that Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram are colluding to boost Hillary Clinton and beat Donald Trump. The old robber barons had political clout, but they had nothing like the control over society’s conversations that today’s Silicon Valley tech lords have.

Merkel is falling in the polls, as Germans realize what she’s done to them. And around the world we see the rise of Trump-like populist campaigns, appealing to citizens who feel that their rulers despise them.  As Noonan concludes, “From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.”