In my last column here for 2020, I’d like to look back to one of my favorite books from the 1990s, Thomas Sowell’s “The Vision of the Anointed.”  To say that the book was prescient is an understatement. You can instantly discern its prescience by savoring its subtitle: “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.” Sowell published his book in 1995.  There was plenty of self-congratulation sprouting across the fruited plain even then. Indeed, it had been a wildly invasive species since the late 1960s. But today it is epidemic. For the last couple of years we have heard a lot about the depredations of “the elites.” But Sowell’s phrase, “the anointed,” is more evocative, not least because of that virus-like insinuation of self-congratulation into the sinews of our national life. The dialectic of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton taught the nation to distinguish between “deplorables,” on one side, and …