Ask any political guru worth his salt, and the savant will explain carefully the facts of the ideological landscape. On one end of the spectrum you have the Left. On the other end is the Right. In the middle are the centrists. There is a passion to label all candidates and voters and place them somewhere along this line.

In practice the mainstream media, the hired political tacticians and other operatives in the ruling class have a sort of shorthand rhetoric. The Left is presented as the normal—nothing to see here, folks—and the centrists are people who have unaccountably strayed from the normal and will ultimately come home again if “we can just get the messaging fine-tuned.”

The ruling class sees itself as the normative leaders of the nation. They have a vision to impose upon America, but they have a difficulty in that their vision is not accepted by most Americans.