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How Thick Is Your Bubble?

 A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?

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the human heart is so acceptable to [a despot] as egotism,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. “A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.” That couldn’t happen in the United States, Tocqueville argued, because of the genius of the founders in devolv-ing power:

Local freedom . . . perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.

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That’s not true anymore. As the new upper class increasingly con-sists of people who were born into upper- middle- class families and have never lived outside the upper- middle- class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary