“The elite are not the problem right now; the people are,” said German president Joachim Gauck, responding to the Brexit vote in June. His comment perhaps reflected an old division with a new twist. The division is the Elite vs. the Street. And the twist, writes columnist Peggy Noonan in a much-read article, is “a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.”

In “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen,” Noonan opines that those “in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage.” The writer mentions how she recently had a conversation with an acquaintance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel about “the issue” that largely inspired the U.K.’s “Brexit”: the mass migration of Muslims into Europe, the Merkel brainchild that has birthed crime, social upheaval, and citizen unrest. Noonan says that the German leader appears “uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house.” This observation, she continued, prompted the acquaintance to sigh and agree, for it’s “one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals.”

The problem, as someone close to me once profoundly put it, is that it’s easy to be idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals. To wit, as Noonan also observed, “Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.” And the elites don’t really seem to care, as they now exhibit little interest in their countrymen’s lives.

Yet is this really unprecedented? As American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson points out, this “detachment” is not “entirely a new thing.… Historically the very point of an aristocracy is to be different from those below you and to operate in a context that in Europe transcended nationality, with intermarriage and more.” Only the degree is different, he says. So what’s really going on?

Many have observed that there’s an effort afoot to break down national and ethnic cohesiveness to pave the way for a consolidation of power (e.g., perpetuating the EU and creating a North American Union). Yet what still needs to be explained is why this motivation, once unheard of, is now so prevalent among elites.

Beginning simply, there was a time when everyone, rich and poor, great and small, was instilled with love of country; today, though, anti-Western inculcation is rife. This often is coupled with and related to “xenophilia,” an erotic (as in emotional) affinity for the most foreign (read: non-Western). Consequently, “I’m better because I’m an Englishman” now often becomes “I’m definitely not better” or, even, “I may be better off if I’m less English.” In other words, the strong emotional attachment to the largest “family” group, the nation, has in these cases been broken.

Part of this equation is modern modes of travel and communication. Even the most affluent aristocrat of yore was more or less physically rooted to his lands; travel was difficult and other nations a world away, foreign, far, and sometimes fearsome. A child of privilege today, though, may frequently be whisked away to foreign locales (but stay at five-star resorts and not really deal with the locals); he may Skype with friends in Sweden, Britain, or Holland, who, given that the upper classes are more likely to be fluent in that now international language of English (even in the United States!), may themselves be elites. Thus may he may feel more in common with these highborn purebreds 2,000 miles away than with the hoi polloi 20 miles away. And so does he grow into that modern sophisticate, the well-traveled man, and may end up what G.K. Chesterton called a “philanderer of nations.” This person never truly loves one nation but has flings with many — and he won’t necessarily respect his own in the morning.

Then there is changing self-interest. The old-time aristocrats certainly wanted the “commoners” to know their place and not breach the castle walls, as they guarded their lands and wealth. The difference is that their lands and wealth were in their nation, and losing their nation could mean losing their shirts. Today’s elites may have holdings the world over, and homes in not just New York and L.A. but Milan, Paris, and Staad. They’re “diversified,” if not actually making money off interests contrary to national interest. And if the ship of state begins listing, they’re entirely comfortable, and capable of, jumping from ship to ship, landing in First Class every time. In the meantime, everyone else is stuck in steerage.

Then there’s the more malevolent self-interest: the political. In the days of ruling royalty, maintaining order was the order of the day. And if the people were relatively happy, they’d likely stay in their place, and if they stayed in their place, the royals would certainly keep their positions. Under this system, there was definitely great incentive to keep unassimilable foreigners out — they might upset that fragile social order.

But along came representative government. And then something happened: As politicians became ever more “left-wing” and tried to sell a liberal agenda and buy votes, they learned that winning power was easier if they imported people more likely to buy what they’re sellin’ and sell what they’re buyin’. And across the Western world a pattern is evident: The native peoples are decidedly more “conservative” than immigrants. Donald Trump’s support is believed to largely lie with the white working class; it was the same story in the May Austrian election, where blue-collar workers went for anti-immigration candidate Norbert Hofer by a whopping 86 percent margin. Also note that Republicans now derive approximately 90 percent of their votes from whites.

In contrast, 70 to 90 percent of the United States' new immigrants — 85 percent of whom hail from the Third World and Asia — vote for left-wing Democrats upon naturalization. That is to say, they vote the same way our elites do. Thus, our elites have more in common politically with foreigners than with working-class Westerners, whom they may not only consider “aliens,” as Noonan put it, but ideological enemies. Note that people may kill over ideology.

But don’t take my word for it. Andrew Neather, a former advisor to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted in 2009 that one of the goals of the mass immigration authored by his Labour Party was “to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Barack Obama said last year he was “pretty optimistic” that conservatism would be drowned out because immigration was making the United States “more of a hodgepodge of folks.” There’s also the aforementioned German president Joachim Gauck and his people-are-the-problem remark. And as the Los Angeles Times wrote in January, “There has long been a shift in left-liberal politics away from any broad identification with ‘the workers’ — narrowly conceived as white, male and straight…. In that regard, Trump's blue-collar support might be viewed as a vindication: Workers of the world, take a hike [says the Left]. We never liked you much anyway.”

This explains much of what’s currently roiling the world. You wage a war generally because you believe you have reason to do so. And then you accept the realities of war, such as “collateral damage,” a euphemism for innocent casualties. The leftist war against Western civilization was well epitomized by the Stanford students who in 1988 chanted, ''Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!'' and who now are about 50 and, sometimes, in positions of prominence (old hippies never die; they just cut their hair). And to these anti-Western secular jihadists, domestic victims of terrorist attacks, illegal-alien-borne diseases, and crimes committed by illegals are simply collateral damage in a holy mission. Ours is a country of 320 million people, so what’s 49 being murdered in Orlando by Omar Mateen? Five-hundred people are murdered every year in Chicago alone. A few thousand people are killed on the road by illegals? Well, that’s statistical noise relative to the 30,000 in total meeting their end in traffic accidents. And with 16,000 homicide victims yearly and millions of other crimes, illegals’ part of it comes out in the wash. None of this will ever be explicitly said, of course — but this is the mentality at work.

Earlier this summer, Patriotic Europeans against The Islamification of the Continent (PEGIDA) supporters blew whistles at President Gauck and shouted, “Traitor!” Is this fair? Well, a traitor is someone who, owing to a financial or ideological incentive, works against his own people. And today’s elites — driven by ideology, finances, or both — do just that.

Of course, it’s hard to say who will successfully be labeled a traitor in an age where treason is the elite norm.