Observed in Europe by VDH:

Disconnect

"...I have probably been to Europe at about thirty times in the last 36 years, and I confess I am just as baffled by the European disconnect now as I was over three decades ago. Such a strange mix-socialist equality of result superimposed over a hierarchical, class-bound, and largely aristocratic society. You see guys in designer clothes, shades, and pricey motor bikes pasting communist posters on light poles. You can have a conversation with a European outraged about American hegemony who in passing talks about a family villa in the mountains, and a beach get-away by the sea, both predicated on limited access and privilege. You can hear ‘Bush did it’ talk, juxtaposed with real racist fury about Muslims and other minorities that are ‘overwhelming’ Europe. You can hear about the beauty of the EU entitlement in the same conversation about an ancestral family estate thankfully not open to the public..."
...You, Not Us

"...I think the disconnect is analogous to what we see in the states, where the technocratic and governing class-think Geithner, Daschle, Solis, Richardson, Spitzer, Dodd Rangel, Jefferson, etc.-thinks either that the rules should not apply to themselves, or that their own professed liberalism somehow should provide exemption from what others must follow. There is something to the age-old observation that the elite liberal mindset is a sort of psychological mechanism by which one justifies his own privilege and exclusivity by professing a cosmic egalitarianism (in theory)..."

Works and Days Wandering Around Europe