To explain the rise of Donald Trump — and his Mexican-bashing, Muslim-baiting, violence-condoning, woman-denigrating, trade-skeptical, insult-driven, blustery kind of politics  — Andrew Sullivan offers us this pearl of wisdom: blame democracy.

Perhaps only a sophisticate steeped in Anglo-Catholic conservatism, having left behind the old neoliberal New Republic for New York magazine, could imagine our new Gilded Age to be a time of excessive democracy in which “barriers to the popular will” are “now almost nonexistent.” Though delivered with unique aplomb, Sullivan’s condescension merely echoes a more general view now common in the corporate press: that Trump’s base of support is a rabble of no-nothing ignoramuses at the bottom of society, the losers left behind by globalization.

Trump himself has fed this myth. “I love the poorly educated,” he said after one victory, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to write, “Mr. Trump knows his market.”