Tales From "the 'Book": Elites, and others

In posting the link to this story linked on the 'Book this morning, in which the author notes the apparent blindness of the elite to the misery of th rest, and laments:

The society is custom-built to keep the rich rich and (most of the time) actually make them richer, no matter what they do. This leads to what you might call the George W. Bush Phenomenon: if you've never, ever suffered seriously no matter how badly you've screwed something up, how can you possibly learn the cause-and-effect relationship between failure and negative consequences? It's the worst-case scenario of moral hazard.

A sense of moral hazard would be preferable to no sense of hazard, but better, in my always humbl;e opinion, would be a concomitant sense of physical trepidation as well:

Woody has noted before the difference between "our" charmed elites, and those elsewhere: Unlike their bretheren in the rest of the world, our oligarchs, aristos, and Bosses do NOT possess the genetic memory of tumbrels, guillotines, and/or firing squads, with the mobs howling for, and later playing foorball with their fuuking heads.

They don't fear "us." They have no reason to do so since, as the piece above points out, anytime the People have shown any inclination to hold their oppressors to account, the State has obligingly roused itself to their active defense, and remediation. The toll of death, injury and legal retribution of the "Class struggle" in the USofA, had it occurred anywhere else, would be described as horrific. In the absence of irony, now impaled on the spike of another Peace prize recipient's definition of the idea, it's difficult to capture the dissonance arising from that record occurring in, putatively and self-regardedly, the "freest" nation EVAR, innit?