MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Trump Wave And The Brexit Boom: Preference Cascades Now Led From The Bottom Up.

It used to be, of course, that the lower and middle classes were stuffy and constrained by social convention while the freethinkers at universities and in the ruling class got to experiment with unconventional ideas. If their experimenting got enough success, then it might eventually filter down to ordinary people. (The sexual revolution worked this way, more or less).

But now it’s our ruling class that is hidebound by political correctness, and it takes movement by the masses to give it permission to express a controversial view. That’s a major change, and it’s one that the ruling class isn’t likely to appreciate much. But having subjected itself to the chains of “acceptable” opinion, what can it do?

I should note, by the way, that this is reminiscent of the old Soviet collapse, where the intellectual classes were under such tremendously close control that it was the working class that took the lead.