In the bonfire of the vanities that is the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s campaign of 2016 one quote from Shattered, the book of the week, stands supreme.

[C]lueless Hillary Clinton... to a close friend, “I don’t understand what’s happening in the country.”

People like Hillary Clinton won’t understand what is happening to the country until they carve out the cataracts in their eyes that prevent them from seeing what their politics hath wrought. And it is pretty obvious that the same applies to the rest of elite liberaldom.

The political movement that built the welfare state and the administrative state and the liberal cultural hegemony is going on the rocks, and liberals can’t believe it.

The political movement that gave us Reagan and won the Cold War is also on the rocks. But we conservatives are not that shocked that good old gentlemanly libertarian conservatism is done. We conservatives went through our five stages of grief in the year between the Descent of Trump and the nomination of Trump, and now face the world without illusion.

Unlike liberals, still hysterically sobbing in their liberal safe space.

To see what is going on it helps to look at another country that may be in the middle of its own Brexit/Trump phenomenon, i.e., France.

Christopher Caldwell in City Journal has a long piece about “The French, Coming Apart” in which he writes that Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart applies not just to the US but to the French. Only things are worse in France.

Caldwell is looking at France through the work of the French writer Christophe Guilluy. Guilluy argues that the old working class in France is never coming back, because even if it could reeducate and retrain it could never afford to live in the “ideopolises” where the new economy jobs are. The old cheap housing stock is now completely occupied by non-white immigrants and the new elite of TV anchors and patent attorneys where the white working class need not apply. So the guys that said they loooved the working class have effectively driven them into the economic wilderness.

Just as in the U.S., the French new class of liberal “symbolic analysts” that once taught the working class to hate their bosses has driven the working class to despair. And the cataracts in their eyes prevent them from seeing the chaos they have wrought.

But who will raise the alarm? Who will tell the ruling class to put its failed ideas and conceits where the sun don’t shine?

The French ruling class has legislated speech codes, so that speaking and writing against the ruling class and its cultural Marxist conceits could get you in trouble. In France they have enacted a what Guilluy calls the “criminalization of criticism of the dominant model.”

France’s antiracist Pleven law, which can punish speech, passed in 1972. In 1990, the Gayssot law criminalized denial or “minimization” of the Holocaust and repealed parts of France’s Law of July 29, 1881, on Freedom of the Press… Suits against novelists, philosophers, and historians have proliferated.

That is how you get a Hillary who doesn’t know what’s happening to the country. It is the consequence of a ruling class that makes it illegal for the rubes to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Today, in America at least for now, an Ann Coulter can tell University of California, Berkeley, that she is coming to speak there irregardless, because “I have constitutional rights,” and a Milo Yiannopoulos can announce that he is coming to Berkeley for his own “Free Speech Week” that might turn into Free Speech Month if the authorities don’t cooperate. For now.

After reading Caldwell I think I understand more than before why our liberals friends have become utterly unmoored since Nov. 8, 2016. Nothing in their comfortable urban liberal bubble prepared them for Brexit and Trump and Le Pen. Of course not. Because liberals have forbidden anyone to disagree with them.

We conservatives are lucky: we have never been able to isolate ourselves in our special cultural bubble, so we know that the world can change against us in an instant.

But liberals from Hillary Clinton on down just “don’t understand what’s happening in the country.”

I am trying to think up a catch phrase to symbolize how the left first seduced, then used, abused, and finally abandoned the working class, averting its eyes from the wounded, mumbling “I just don’t understand.” I have in mind something like “The Great Betrayal,” only sharper.

We need some sort of meme like this, because the demolition of the white working class is happening all over the western world, and attention must be paid.

And the way back starts with what the Chinese call the Rectification of Names. In Anglo-Saxon, this is termed “calling a spade a spade.”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.