In a recent column, I asked a question: “How did Paul Ryan of Janesville, Wis., come to stand for the ‘elites,’ while Donald J. Trump of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, came to stand for ‘the people’ or ‘the electorate’?” I continued,

When Ryan was 16, he found his father dead. He worked his way up. Is this not American?
In his Republican primary this year, he beat the Trumpite candidate by 84 percent to 16 percent. His opponent had labeled him “the head of the globalist snake.” (This is how fascists and other anti-democrats have long talked, by the way.)
Those 84 percent voting for Ryan: Were they not “people” or Americans? Did they go to the polls with their top hats, monocles, and canes, keeping the real people out?

Today, I was discussing all this with some colleagues, and I later had a memory. Years ago, I was working at a golf course in Ann Arbor, and making minimum wage, or close to it. Frequently, I had to listen to players — very well off — say that the Republican party was “the party of the rich.”

I, the minimum-wage pro-shop rat, was often the only Republican in the joint!

Further on this business of “elites” and “people”: One of the reasons I rejected the Left, long ago, is that they were always talking in these Marxian class categories. I did not think these categories were true to life — consistent with reality. I still don’t. And I hear this same language coming from the Right.

One more word: This morning, I said (something like), “Paul Ryan has to be the top-hatted elite while Donald Trump gets to be the horny-handed son of toil.” Fred Schwarz later remarked to me, “At least the ‘horny handed’ part is right.”