When you live in a neighborhood of gangs, you must accommodate the gang that does you the least harm. And you do, you know. You’ve always lived in a neighborhood of gangs. You always will. The only question is which gang you accommodate.

If you live on the right side of Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York, you’ve dodged the unlawful gangsters. But no matter where you live, you can’t dodge the lawful gangsters we call government.

All gangs have this in common: they’re alliances of bullies whose tactics deprive others of what the gangsters want. There’s no form of intimidation or expropriation to which gangsters won’t descend to get what they want. And what they want is dominion. Their tactics depend on the scope of dominion they seek and the paradigm under which they seek it. Some are petty and brutal. Some are grand and devious. None is more grand and devious than government. And when government goes awry, none is more damaging and more deadly.

The lust for power’s part of the human condition. The desire for dominion’s universal. And the historical record’s a litany of potentates and their ploys. Whether priests, princes, or presidents, the end game’s always the same. Only the players and the paradigms change.

In post-modern democracies, these are the players: a political class, a privileged class, an unprivileged class, and an underclass. And here’s the paradigm: the political class buys the votes of the underclass; the privileged class buys the patronage of the political class; and the unprivileged class gets ground beneath the politically-correct juggernaut.

In what’s left of the American Republic, the only meaningful political class is the Federal one. It has usurped the states’ constitutional powers. It has reduced political representation to a binary choice between candidates chosen by two private political parties conspiring to exclude all competition. It’s composed of careerist professional politicians interested solely in maintaining their power. It’s unprincipled and omnipotent. Its pretext is a social justice long since segued into a politics of victimization that divides to conquer. Its appetite is to make us all servants of itself.

There are only two political gangs in America. One’s the Democratic Party, and the other’s the Republican Party. The only difference between them is the side of political town on which you live. There is no opposition political party. In reality, the nation is governed by a professional political duopoly which merely caucuses in two private parties with different names. If one party didn't have the other, it would have to invent it merely to maintain the illusion of a political opposition and a two-party state. Their aims are the same: reducing the citizenry to neofeudal servitude on the Federal estate.

Until -- just possibly until -- Donald Trump, that is.

Trump can’t do a fraction of what he’s promising to do. Presidential candidates are essentially but the leaders of the two private political gangs that monopolize the nation’s governance. Constitutionally, the Federal legislature is the republic’s only real governing power. And, if Trump’s elected, he won’t have a Federal Legislature eager to help him achieve his promises.

But the real point is this. Trump -- a political interloper -- has already effected a stunning populist coup against the entire Republican Party establishment. That establishment detests Trump as much as the Democratic one does. Yet, lo and behold, Trump’s the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. And, veiled truth be told, Trump’s polling ahead of Clinton. That’s an astonishing exception to a century of exclusive political domination. 

What that should tell Middle America is that Trump has energized -- across party lines -- a coalition of the politically disenfranchised American electorate. That’s mostly white, middle-class, working men and women whom academia hasn't yet terminally brainwashed. There are still enough of them to make a difference. But there won't be after eight years of a Clinton presidency because, by its end, we'll have another 30 million Latin American, African, and Middle-Eastern interlopers voting here.

What Trump can do -- if he has the leadership balls -- during an eight-year presidency is force the Republican Party to realize its real constituency is a newly energized political opposition of the disenfranchised unprivileged class. That, and also deny a Clinton presidency the opportunity to forever overwhelm the traditional American electorate with 30 million refugees from the world's failed states.

Can Trump do it? Will he do it? Is it already too late? Nobody knows. But Clinton sure as hell won't do it, Trump's all the unprivileged class has left, and the margin by which his popular vote may exceed his smaller electoral vote is the margin by which the Republican Party may potentially be convinced to banish its Paul Ryans and become -- for the first time in the last century -- a real party in actual political opposition.

That's why Middle America should hold its nose as much as necessary, get off its derriere, and go vote for Trump. Remember, ladies, your fathers and husbands are men, and half your offspring are too. Remember, African Americans, your dysfunctional schools and crime-ridden ghettos are the consequence of a centralized political duopoly that has made many of you mere dependents of the state. Remember, Hispanics, tens of millions of your brethren illegally here merely depress the wages of those of you legally here. Remember, corporate America, when the Chinese stop buying America’s metastasizing debt, you’re going offshore more than you ever bargained for.  

Otherwise, we'll all ultimately find ourselves kicking the severed head of our own Marquis de Launay around our own version of the Place de Grève. And drinking the blood of our fellow citizens.

The only reasonable response of good men and women everywhere is it's never too late.

Until, of course, it is.

And then Napoleon succeeds Doctor Guillotine.

As Santayana said, "when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."