No not really. Going back millennia, there has always been an elite within a society. The difference that is recent to emerge is that there is a growing disconnect between the interests of the elite and the societies to which they supposedly belong.

Nationalist vs Globalist is a pretty good summarization.

The globalists seem primarily interested in using their positions of power to enrich themselves and gratify their egos, and they perhaps feel they are doing something right in their policy prescriptions, but it is driven by complete lack of understanding of human nature.

The nationalists understand that humans have concentric (genetic) loyalties, from self, to family, to nation/race. These are just facts of nature, fighting against them is a losing battle and arranging our societies along these natural lines will produce the best outcomes.

The nationalists want the best for the whole world, not just a tiny trans-national elite.

Trump is a nationalist.

(Yes I know this seems antithetical to the experience of many in SV, elite universities, etc. What these supposedly smart people fail to understand is that they are among outliers of outliers. Exceptions to rules are not unknown, but basing our policy on exceptions is an invitation to disaster.)

There's nothing new about the current 'disconnect' between American elite and others; people pull out the same rhetoric every few years, it seems. And there is no long-term adherence of others to populism (which is being expressed by you as nationalism).

It's not a social truth, despite attempts to raise above reproach its horrible behavior and worse consequences, it's just an old political technique used by some political leaders for their own purposes, as Bob Dylan pointed out, a brushfire they set which now has turn into a raging, out of control forest fire. We can do something about it.

> These are just facts of nature

We can say murder and rape are facts of nature; is it 'elitist' to outlaw them? I don't feel they are 'facts' of my nature, in that they somehow inevitable, and neither is racism.

There are far better angels of our nature, and America was founded on them. 'All men are created equal' and liberty for those men (and women), not just people you happen to like. That has resonated with people's natures for centuries now; I think we can say it's not longer an 'experiment', as Lincoln called it, and it's attracted immigrants from every culture and inspired many more around the world. A lot of those populist 'white' people, as they call themselves, used to hate each other as Irish and Italians and Germans and Poles, Catholics and Protestants and Jews. It turned out those divisions weren't in their natures after all.

Nicely said -- however I would disagree with the claim that our best achievable society is no longer an experiment. To remove beta status and pretend it is an understood phenomenon leads to thinking like the parent's more so than thinking like the rest of your comment ...

>Yes I know this seems antithetical to the experience of many in SV, elite universities, etc. What these supposedly smart people fail to understand is that they are among outliers of outliers. Exceptions to rules are not unknown, but basing our policy on exceptions is an invitation to disaster.

I think you're giving them too much credit even. Their world view is ultimately incoherent, based more in "niceness" than in any consistent belief system. Contemptuous of Middle America for valuing cultural unity[1], they viciously demand adherence to their own rigid moral precepts, while also seeking to import mass numbers from populations that don't share one bit in those precepts.

[1] One of the wonderful aspects of American nationalism is that this unity is not racial, but cultural.

> The nationalists want the best for the whole world

That's not even remotey accurate.