VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America’s Coastal Royalty: The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

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