Half the blogs I follow seem to be linking to this, so I figured I'd pass it on too. Most noteworthy is the author, and the publication it appeared in. Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr, and she now writes for the Wall Street Journal.

There's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming...

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread?

And how the elites are dealing with what they see coming?

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours." ...

Not all of course. There are a lot of people--I know them and so do you--trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They're trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks. ...

I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.