From where pundits sit, the world is fine and dandy, even if they're "liberals" or "leftists." They have jobs and homes and money and the coolest little gadgets the world has ever known.
But out in the hinterlands, the herd is spooked.
Their credit cards are maxed out, their families are broken, their young males are penned-off in bedrooms, staring at internet porn; the herd sees the closed factories and the barbed wire and the empty downtown storefronts, where they used to feed. Their unease has been heightened by a granular diet of fear, from Ebola to Chi-Raq to ISIS. And the soothing words of their political shepherds haven't led to the pastures of plenty they were promised.
The pundits, fat and happy in the middle of the herd, where the best grass is, assume that this year's cattle drive will be like all the other round-ups. They pride themselves on their data analytics.
But not even Nate Silver can predict the behavior of a spooked herd.
Spooked herds are the specialty of hyenas like Donald Trump.
First, you pick off the lame and the weak on the fringes. Then you promise to protect the herd from predators the herd can't see. And then, once you've got the broods' nostrils twitching with fear, you sing a song of verdant fields - with grass as green and tender as in Days of Old - just over the next hill. And the multitudes stampede.
And over the cliff they go.
At the bottom of which, the hyenas feed.
And laugh.