Thanks to Brexit, New Yorkers discovered ‘the inequality thing’

A few days before the vote on Brexit, a crowd of Democratic Party grandees gathered in one of Manhattan’s toniest venues. Old friends and allies happily greeted one another, and as liquor unlocked emotions, one of them turned nostalgic about his stint in the Clinton Administration — a happier time, when the party was unified around the cult of political pragmatism known as triangulation. ‘Yes,’ said a misty-eyed associate who also remembered those days fondly. ‘We didn’t have the inequality thing…. How did we miss it?’

Propriety prevents me from identifying the participants, but the clueless arrogance about ‘the inequality thing’ largely sums up the reaction to Britain’s Leave vote in America’s capital of high finance and outsized intellectual pretentions. Of course they missed it, along with everything else that has brought the United States to a class divide unseen since the Gilded Age — not to mention to the brink of electing Donald Trump as President.