There is a specter haunting America. It is the specter of the common working man and woman. The person who does the daily work that keeps the society moving. The person who inhabits the rungs of the working class and the lower middle class. The person whose absence from the workplace would be felt immediately and profoundly.

They are the people who do not have to be shown how to swipe a card at the MTA. They get paid by the hour, or at modest salaries, and have to save all year to take their two-week vacations, usually by car. Their children go to deteriorating public schools swarming with children who do not speak English as a first language. If fortunate, they will go on to a community college overrun with students and not enough course offerings. If they make it through that, they will incur excessive debt to meet the usurious costs of even a four-year public college.

Part of that debt will be incurred for tuition for courses that are a mixture of social engineering and indoctrination, useless ideology known as diversity requirements. These are required courses because almost no one who could exercise a choice would ever take them. Even then, other courses are often falsely advertised. A history of World War I becomes a history of women ambulance drivers in WWI. English literature becomes a course on animal rights complete with mandatory duty at the local SPCA cleaning out cages.

A full five percent of each tuition dollar goes to fund an ever-expanding diversity and opportunity bureaucracy whose real function is to create an artificial minority middle class made up of people who faced head-on the intellectual challenges of getting a degree in higher education administration.

And after the debt and surviving all of the bullshit, most of these degrees will be as worthless as the courses were boring and irrelevant

But what is worthy and relevant is the debt that will be packaged like so many mortgages in a prior decade and sold on the financial markets. Loans can now be extended from 15 to 25 and even 30 years, and the sale of the loans provides money for new loans and new indenture.

But how do you repay the debt when the job you ended up with does not really require a college education, not that you learned any marketable skills while you were getting English literature credit for cleaning out animal waste at the SPCA? And the diversity requirement fulfilled by a course in the lesser lesbian poets did not really hone your economic skill set.

In the day of the Internet a real education need not be expensive and could be delivered anywhere, especially in fields that do not require laboratories. After all, the British did correspondence education throughout the Empire in the 19th Century. No ivy-covered buildings, beer parties, and orgies came with those courses, but then too there was an absence of student debt and no cleaning cages at the SPCA.

So when young, working people follow Bernie Sanders because he promises them debt relief, they do not care who is going to pick up the tab because the system screwed them, and they want to screw it back.

When conservative talk show hosts bellyache that Donald Trump is not a real conservative, the common person sees that as an advantage. How can you talk about individual initiative and hard work in an era when Saudi Arabia can lower the price of oil to a point of destroying tens of thousands of jobs in North Dakota and Texas? 

The common person does not have to think twice about how Hillary Clinton, who never ran a business, never made a payroll, and rarely held a job outside of government is worth not just millions but tens of millions.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle promised to do good and ended up doing right well, for themselves.

The common person has had it with the elites and their promises, with Democrats who can find funds for illegal immigrants but not for the working poor, and with Republicans who preach individual initiative in an economy that is tossed about in the stormy seas of international crises.

Sanders and Trump are two sides of the same coin. The common person does not care about their ideology. They care about sticking it to a political and economic system that has abandoned them. And as absurd as it might sound, if Sanders loses, a fair amount of his supporters will run to Trump because this election is not about ideology but about payback.