There they go again. In San Jose last week, lefty demonstrators rioted against typical Americans leaving a Donald Trump rally, and the mayor of San Jose blamed Donald Trump for the violence. In the 21st century, in a democratic republic where “the people rule,” what is going on?

I had my come-to-Jesus moment about this when a liberal friend told me a few years ago that she had always wanted to get into activism. Then, while auditing philosophy courses at the University of Washington in Seattle, I heard two young women on two different occasions testified that politics, for them, meant a protest march to City Hall. Really?

This is the liberal “activism culture” and they are teaching it to good little girls in our schools and universities. It means that if you are a good little girl, you think that “activism” and “peaceful protest” are what every good little girl should want to do.

I want a president who can lance this boil on the fair skin of America, before it infects the whole nation.

The liberal apology for activism, paraphrased from an email to me from a humanities pr5ofessor, is that if you are a marginalized group, excluded from the mainstream of society, you need to look for help and you find it, probably, on the left. Then the left takes up your cause and uses its power to help you.

Only the left is not using its power to help you. It is using street intimidation to force everyone else to help you.

Let us ask the question: when is this “activism” justified? When is intimidation necessary? The answer is quite simple.

In the 19th century, the workers were migrating from the country to the factory jobs in the city, but they were outside the political system. The only way they could get the attention of the ruling class was with riots. But, relates Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, once the workers got the vote and got their representatives into the parliaments and the corridors of power, they didn’t need to riot any more. So they didn’t.

Street action and riot are justified only for people excluded from the political community. Indeed, the whole point of laws and elections and due process and representative assemblies and constitutions is to provide a spectrum of non-violent means to petition government for the redress of grievances. They remove the excuse for revolutionary action.

But the revolutionaries -- the Marxes, the Luxemburgs, the Saul Alinskys, the Bill Ayers -- they live for revolution and activism. If the patriarchy ups and gives the workers and then women the vote, and then civil rights for African Americans, because the patriarchal middle class is not that interested in power, what is to happen to the activists, poor things?

The answer is simple, and it was formulated in the 1920s by the Frankfurt School. There always must be oppressed and marginalized groups other than the workers for whom protest, threatening violence, is the only option. And we, the activists and the intellectuals, will know the reason why. So liberal activists are always insisting that it is 1848 and today’s fully enfranchised voters are just as oppressed and marginalized as the workers of 1848.

Only they aren’t. Since 1800 per capita income has grown from $3 per day to $100 per day in the west. There has been nothing like it in human history, ever.

At $100 per day in a representative democracy with universal franchise how bad can things be to justify lefty activists ginning up their “peaceful protests” and making “non-negotiable demands” to their paymasters in the liberal ruling class or thugging after Trump supporters?

It is a good question, and here is how our lefty friends have solved it. They insist that their latest political clients are as helpless as the workers of 1848 or the southern blacks of Jim Crow. And so their street action is justified.

Obviously this cunning plan cannot work unless people are forbidden to object to leftist activist rhetoric and “peaceful protest.” Hence the necessity of political correctness, naming and shaming, racist/sexist/homophobe labeling, “hate” speech, and SJWs.

The last time the left went into the streets in full activism mode, back in the Sixties, America ended up with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Today, with the good little girls of America, like, educated to the lefty activism culture, OMG, it might, like, end up different this time around. Whatever.

If the United States is to lance the boil of the left-wing activism culture, and make America safe for people that are not that interested in power, it will need a president who can name and shame the rioters of San Jose, early and often, and anathematize the liberal intellectuals and activists that egg them on and divide us.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.