Here is what Will Rogers had to say about how mankind breaks down:

There are three kinds of men.  The very few who learn by reading.  The several who learn by observation.  The rest of them need to pee on the electric fence to find out for themselves.

Let's hope Will was wrong. 

The fundamental difference between rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans is in their belief in government's role and potential.  Imagine a "reasonable" Democrat.  Let's call him "Bob."  He believes that government is analogous to a mechanical pump.  It sucks up resources from point A in the economy and delivers them to solve a problem at Point B.  He selects political leaders by picking "engineers" who promise to keep the pump balanced to deliver the right amount of money to the right problem.  The government pump also provides a time-saving service, making Bob's philanthropic choices for him and discharging his social responsibilities.  It's very convenient.  Anyone who objects to any service being delivered to any Democratic Party constituency must be very stingy, probably even racist. 

Now imagine a Republican we'll call "Jack."  Like the framers of the Constitution, he sees government as a watchdog.  Its role is to savage criminals who would do him or his family harm, whether they are domestic thieves or foreign despots.   Jack knows that a vicious animal is necessary in a violent world, but it must be kept leashed and strong enough only to discourage the bad guys.  If it becomes too strong, it will kill its masters.  Jack sees that our government assumes increasing control over the lives of free Americans.  As it regulates, requires, and forbids things it never did before, Jack says the country is fast becoming a tyranny.

Reasonable Bob thinks Jack's a hysteric and a crackpot who's just afraid of change.  Bob likes to see himself as a fearless and informed voice of reason.  So Bob says in the most condescending voice possible, "Don't worry.  Everything will turn out all right." 

Bob belongs to Will Rogers's third group.  Either he's ignorant or he forgets the many hideously failed attempts to build his government pump.  In America, fifty years of War on Poverty have produced only unemployment, "baby daddies," and anger at the haves from the have-nots.  More sobering still, the Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, and Communist Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge all promised to lift the lives of their underdog audience, whom they identify as peasants, the workers, or "lower classes."  Instead, they ended starving and murdering tens of millions.  We should all pale at Obama's similar promises to help his target audience, "working-class Americans," if only we let him seize more power. 

The model of government as a pump is hogwash; there is no feature on a mechanical pump analogous to the one in a too powerful government that operates gulags, concentration camps, re-education centers, or killing fields of the leftist governments of the 20th century or North Korea and Iran today.  And 140 million victims in a century means it's not the laughably rare event Bob would like to believe it is.    

One of the common methods of leftist government mass murder was to have the victims dig a long trench.  The victims then lined up at the edge, were shot, fell into the pit they had just dug, and were covered over.  Imagine Bob and Jack standing at the edge of such a trench in their last moments.  Jack turns to Bob and says, "Now will you believe me when I tell you they're evil?"  Bob answers for the last time, "Don't worry.  Everything will turn out all right." 

So, when should it have been obvious that Bob was the actual crackpot of the pair?  What were the clues Bob missed telling him not to vote for the people who wanted to overfeed the beast and turn it loose? 

The big red flashing warning sign was called "scapegoating."  M. Scott Peck* and history tell those of us in Will Rogers's first two groups that when a nation's population learns to scapegoat, human evil is on the prowl, and mass murder isn't far behind.  Germany in 1932 was a cultured, civilized society.  But when Hitler taught Germans to scapegoat Jews and other minorities for all their problems, he suddenly found enough willing German hands to help him exterminate 11 innocent million men, women, and children.  Stalin scapegoated kulaks, tsarists, and Trotskyites and murdered 20 million.  Pol Pot scapegoated city people, intellectuals, anyone with ties to the pre-revolutionary government, and ethnic Vietnamese, eventually murdering over a quarter of the population of Cambodia.  Mao Tse-Tung turned the people's hatred towards landlords, intellectuals, "counter-revolutionaries," and hosts of others, murdering 60 million, give or take 10 million, by starvation, forced labor, and executions.

We see scapegoating behavior being used to animate the political Left in America at an accelerating pace.  Obama habitually scapegoats others for his screw-ups.  Paraphrasing: "I didn't set a red line; the world set a red line."  "I didn't see ISIS rising because the intelligence community failed."  "Iraq's government and George W. Bush made me give away our Iraq victory."  He scapegoats the Israelis for violence committed against them.  He scapegoated George W. Bush, banks who wouldn't lend money, oil companies, lazy Americans, Japanese tsunamis, ATMs, and George W. Bush some more for the failure of his stimulus program for a year after he took office. 

Hillary's scapegoating is just as blatant.  She scapegoated Monica Lewinsky and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for her husband's depravity.  She scapegoated (and prosecuted) a filmmaker for her Benghazi debacle.  This week she scapegoated Donald Trump for the violence of domestic Islamic terrorists that she and Obama promised and failed to defeat. 

Can Americans really be seduced into group evil and a mob mentality by corrupt politicians?  Consider the man who explained the recent Milwaukee riots this way.  "The rich people they got all this money, and they not tryin' to give us none."  This man clearly refuses to take responsibility for his obvious shortcomings, preferring to scapegoat others.  It's also clear that he didn't think up this scapegoat for his violence on his own.  He learned from Democrats who talk about "the One Percent" and promise to strip and humble them for the sin of being affluent.  Everywhere you look, there are people nursing grudges, and the Democratic Party is helping them sharpen their scapegoating skills. 

Of course, "common sense" gun control will also go a long way to making us helpless against them.

What do you think, Bob?  Was Will Rogers wrong, or do we have to learn about electric fences and mass graves for ourselves?  Flattering yourself as the voice of calm and reason won't work after you find out too late that the symptoms of human evil were everywhere, and you chose not to know them. 

Today Will Rogers would probably say there are three kinds of men: the ones who recognize evil, the ones who never will, and the vast majority who will recognize it too late. 

* Dr. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.