Over the past two weeks, the elite media Twittersphere has erupted with extremely intense opinions about The Atlantic’s hiring and then reverse-hiring of Kevin Williamson, previously a writer for the National Review. Any regular human beings who took a wrong turn on the internet and encountered this storm of takes must have found it incomprehensibly bonkers.

On the one hand, Williamson holds beliefs about abortion that are so barbaric and outside earth norms that it’s like he’s visiting from a theocratic colony on Neptune. He’s said that while he’s “kind of squishy on capital punishment in general,” he was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code” — and for women who undergo abortions, what he “had in mind was hanging.” Even Saudi Arabia, which has based an entire hereditary dictatorship on loathing women, doesn’t go that far.

But in my experience, normal Americans never read The Atlantic and, in fact, rarely differentiate between news outlets at all. Instead, they perceive the combined U.S. media as a Big Pile of Stuff Online. And you can find opinions of equivalent brutality — say, that we must immediately nuke Venezuela or reinstitute chattel slavery — all over the internet. So why does it matter if some guy is moving his freaky thoughts from one URL to another?

Meanwhile, professional conservatives perceive monumental, historic significance in the Battle of Kevin Williamson. For instance, Ben Shapiro asserted that Williamson’s defenestration was an example of “how you got Trump.” Sure, the Democrats in Michigan who gambled on Donald Trump might believe they did so because they liked how he talked about jobs or race, or they wanted a tax cut, or they sense that the U.S. is changing in ways that make them uncomfortable. But no, it turns out that they voted for Trump because the Washington Post hasn’t hired enough of Shapiro’s friends.

So none of this makes sense — unless you understand that the whole thing is part of the U.S. class struggle.

Not the class struggle between proletarians and top hat-wearing industrialists, of course. That war’s been over for decades, and the industrialists won.

However, there is an ongoing, ferocious class war between America’s technocrats and conservative billionaires. The technocrats and the billionaires both possess real power, but it originates from different sources.

The technocrats are doctors or lawyers or computer programmers or scientists. The technocrats’ power comes from the fact that they understand how to do all the things that keep society physically functioning on a daily basis.

They have this power because they’ve spent their lives learning and using key principles of the Enlightenment: i.e., that there is a reality independent of our mushy, yearning brains; that through careful, rational study we can figure out how to manipulate it; and that to make all this work, we must accept that words have meaning. The last part is where journalists come in: They are crucial but weaker members of the technocratic class.

The conservative billionaires have a more obvious form of power: They own a giant chunk of America.

For decades after World War II, there was an uneasy peace between America’s superrich and the technocrats. The superrich accepted that they had to share power with the technocrats, while the technocrats accepted that the superrich were the senior partners. In return, the rich got a smoothly functioning society, and the technocrats got a hefty share of America’s good stuff for themselves. Meanwhile, they united against the remaining 85 percent of Americans.

But starting in the 1970s, the conservative faction of the superrich decided to break the alliance and seize as much power from the technocrats as possible.

This stealthy putsch went hand in hand with the development among the conservative superrich of a culture of rage at the technocrats. It was maddening enough for the reactionary right that they had to pay the technocrats and give them pensions and health care. But what was worse was that these “experts” were constantly buzzing around their ears, telling them that there was such a thing as reality, and that it refused to respond to their every whim.

No, slashing taxes on the 0.001 percent doesn’t increase government revenue. No, it isn’t possible to invade Iraq and instantaneously transform it into a drier version of Dallas. No, the latest study from RAND found that you cannot in fact command the tides.

Trump, of course , is the reductio ad absurdum of this right-wing billionaire fury. He’s simply the logical endpoint of a phenomenon that’s been gathering force for decades, and has now filtered down from the generals of the conservative right to its corporals and privates. As John Adams said, “Such is the frailty of the human heart that very few men who have no property have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property who has attached their minds to his interest.” It was particularly easy for right-wing billionaires to pull this off in this case because technocrats often do have contempt for regular people, who can smell it.

Now with Trump in mind, take a look back at this famous passage from a 2004 New York Times article by Ron Suskind:

The [George W. Bush] aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Then there’s this 2009 cri-de-coeur from Rush Limbaugh:

Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!

You couldn’t find any better illustrations of what movement conservatism has become. The issue isn’t that members specifically dispute that global warming exists or that evolution is real. It’s that their movement fundamentally rejects the Enlightenment.

When American technocrats saw Trump supporters in 2016 wearing T-shirts that said “Fuck Your Feelings,” they couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. After all, they’re trained to privilege empirical evidence over emotion. But what the technocrats didn’t understand was that the operative word on the T-shirts wasn’t “feelings,” but “your.”