For the last few months I’ve had a question in my mind: Just what is George Soros up to? Because I could not understand why a great capitalist speculator, a financial operator who makes the Koch Brothers look like altar boys, would be interested in funding a lefty activist group like Black Lives Matter. It didn’t compute.

But now I understand. No doubt you readers already figured it out. Alas, I am not so smart.

The light went on when I was reading “Progressivism Goes Global” by John Fonte and John Loo in National Review about the plans of the progressive global governance guys. The key point is articulated in a quote from Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of policy and planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Her idea is that the “global administrative state would work through the ‘coercive power of vertical [government] networks’”:

Vertical government networks pierce the shell of state sovereignty by making individual government institutions -- courts, regulatory agencies, or even legislators -- responsible for implementation of rules created by a supranational institution.

Don’t you just love that? The globalists get the power, and get to pull the strings behind the national governments, and coerce them into doing their global will.

But first, before the globalists ascend Mt. Olympus, they need to “pierce the shell” and destroy the prestige and the power of the nation state; otherwise the national governments will still have the power to tell the globalist gods to go pound sand. How do the globalists do that?

It’s obvious. They divide and conquer. They set the people in each nation state against each other. They divide them up by class, by race, by gender, by tribe: Black Lives Matter; La Raza; Human Rights Campaign, CAIR. With one ring to rule them all.

So that is why George Sauron and all the top-tier foundations are funding groups like Black Lives Matter. That is why the globalists are all in favor of unlimited immigration. The more that the people in America think of themselves as black or white or Hispanic or gay or Muslim rather than American, the easier it is for the global elite to “pierce the shell of state sovereignty” while we are all busy fighting each other.

So far so good. But there is a problem, as the globalists are finding out, to their horror.

The problem with globalism is what to do when things go wrong, as in the Euro, as in Muslim rapists in Europe and no-go areas in Sweden.

In the nation state, when things go wrong, the voters throw the rascals out and elect a new government. They might elect a Roosevelt over a blundering Hoover. Nothing changes, of course, unless they elect a Reagan, for the ruling class is still the ruling class blundering from crisis to crisis; but at least the people have a new leader and new hope.

What happens under global governance when things go wrong? Huh? Appoint a committee?

Exactly. You globalist geniuses didn’t think of that, did you?

That is what Enoch Powell meant when he said that the European project could not work because there was no European demos, no European people. You need a “people” when things go wrong, so the polity hangs together rather than separately.

Right now, of course, things are going wrong with the globalist project, and the result is that the people in the various nation states in Europe are rallying to politicians that want to re-establish the powers of the nation state to throw the globalist rascals out. While they still can.

What luck that the globalist project ran off the road so soon. Given another 20 years of Soros-funded identity politics, with Muslim Lives Matter making Black Lives Matter look like a walk in the park, the people of Europe would have split up into squabbling racial and religious identities, and with things going wrong and the failure of the globalist elite there would be no demos to throw the rascals out.

Hello globalists, progressives, and all the ships at sea. The whole point of constitutions and laws and separation of powers and elections to secure the consent of the governed is this. They help stop civil war. The political furniture that you want to “pierce” is the way for the people to check their rulers short of bloody civil war.

It is telling that in the aftermath of the Charlotte Riots, President Obama is burbling about white police officers learning about discrimination, and Hillary Clinton is missing in action. It is Donald Trump that is calling for unity.

Of course. Donald Trump stands for Making America -- the nation state of Americans -- Great Again. Obama and Clinton are globalist progressives. They don’t care about unity; they care about divide and conquer.

Now, finally, I get it.

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.