Rahm Emanuel has identified an alarming problem in American politics. He may as well have found it by staring into a mirror.

The explanation for President Donald Trump’s dismaying rise, he argues in The Atlantic on Tuesday, is that economic and political elites have engineered a society that pampers themselves while punishing working people. “The elite get all the breaks and are shown all the shortcuts,” Emanuel, an elite, writes in the nation’s leading journal of elite opinion. “In the meantime, ordinary people are forced to pay full freight.”

It’s an interesting premise, considering the same could very well be said of the past eight years of life in Chicago under Emanuel’s rule. But his two terms as mayor, which concluded on Monday, go without mention. The only time he appears in the article is as the heroic Obama underling who was tragically ignored after the financial meltdown: “As the White House chief of staff, I argued, unsuccessfully, that the American people needed the catharsis of seeing that the bankers who had gotten the country into this mess were being forced to take responsibility.”

The implication is that Democrats today ignore Emanuel’s advice at their own peril. But the bluster he postures as insight contains very few calories. He puts his finger on “the most important, least understood, and underappreciated political dynamic of our era: a full-on middle-class revolt against the elites and the privileges they hoard. For all the focus on inequality and social justice, this middle-class revolt is the most important barrier standing between Democrats and the White House. They can’t afford to ignore it.”

This supposedly “underappreciated” revolt has been at the center of the political conversation for many years now. Since Trump’s rise, reporters from elite media organizations have been shipped out to the hinterlands to embed with these new enemies of the elite, to figure out what exactly had happened to America.