Last week, the New Yorker published a cartoon that quickly became an ideological Rorschach test.

When Clintonite liberals looked at the drawing — which depicted an angry airplane passenger calling on fellow travelers to support his bid to take over the plane from the “smug,” out-of-touch pilots — many discerned a biting, incisive satire of the populist shift in contemporary politics. They sung the cartoonist’s praises and tutted at the confused, idiotic masses foolish enough to think that they should decide who flies the metaphorical plane.

Others reacted quite differently, viewing the cartoon as another example of the preening condescension that’s helped elevate populist politicians of various stripes. They fumed as their timelines filled up with jokes about the rubes that refused to leave politics to the experts.