The American Founders often wore wigs, at least in their official portraits.  The term "Whigs" became a label for the Founders' intellectual elite of highly (self-) educated men like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and the others, who saw themselves as English gentlemen in the New World and who therefore insisted on the legal rights of Englishmen as well.  That is what the Declaration of Independence insisted on.  When the Declaration was refused, the moral and legal basis of the American Revolution was established.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, and soon after came a popular revolt: Jacksonian Democracy.  Ultimately, the Jacksonians gave rise to the greatest Jacksonian of all, Abraham Lincoln, a great man who, in the end, transcended parties and constituencies, at enormous cost in human pain and suffering, including his own assassination.

Well, conservatives have their own Whig establishment today, people who refuse to support Donald Trump the Vulgarian – George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Ryan, and Bill Kristol prominent among them.  In this do-or-die election between a radical-left fanatic (Hillary) and a commonsense conservative (Donald Trump), our Whigs are priggishly sitting out the fight.  It's a breathtaking 50-50 election, and their systematic betrayal may bring us another four to eight years of Hillary Clinton, symbolic daughter of Betty Friedan the Communist. 

This is for real, folks.  Check it out yourself.  In the 1920s, Julien Benda wrote a vitally important book, The Treason of the Clerks (meaning the intellectual class), in which he nailed the radical left.  In that time, as in ours, the biggest radical revolutionaries were safely ensconced in schools and colleges, with lifetime tenure, sniping at the bourgeois taxpayers. 

We have a thousand examples of the same treacherous rabble in this country.  B.H. Obama; Bill Clinton; and yes, Hillary are their direct spawn. 

It's only one small step from being an "idealistic globalist" to committing treason against one's nation.  Our college students these days are taught that patriotism is evil and globalism is good.  Radicals like Hillary live in denial that America is only real protection from a dangerous world.  Hillary and her daughter Chelsea are apparently in the habit of calling their Secret Service protectors "pigs," the same people who have volunteered to put their bodies on the line when some assassin goes for their charges.  The least the Clinton women could do is express real gratitude and respect, but they aren't made that way. 

Is Hillary still the radical leftist who came out of Wellesley college?  It is the only way to explain her treacherous behavior – in Benghazi, in the email leak of national security secrets, and in her close alliance with the most obvious Muslim Brotherhood agent in the world, Huma Abedin.

What the newsies now call globalism used to be called "internationalism" by the Communist Party anthem, "The Internationale."  The fantasy dream of international peace and love captures a lot of gullible suckers.  From globalism to actual treason is only a few steps, as we know from the idealistic Rosenbergs, who sent the Manhattan Project nuclear plans to Jozef Stalin.  The Rosenbergs were nice, idealistic "liberals" who felt sure that Stalin deserved his own nukes. 

Obama and the Clintons are also "globalists," like George Soros and many a campus professor of Ethnic Studies. 

Hillary's B.A. thesis celebrating Saul Alinsky shows the same slippery slope.  From a Goldwater Girl, she became a Wellesley radical feminist, Wellesley being at that time a hotbed of feminist agitation, along with lesbian recruiting.  Sounds innocent enough?  Not when you come out with an undergrad thesis called "There is Only the Fight," as Hillary did.  The word "Fight" is the same in Communi-jargon as the word "Struggle" in Marx, which is the same as "Kampf" in Hitler's Mein Kampf, which is the same as "jihad" in radical Islam.  Militant war-making fanaticism is always the same; only the labels change, to keep the enemy confused.  But Saul Alinsky did us the favor of defining "the enemy" as the American middle class. 

At Wellesley, Hillary was exactly the right age to be recruited by some totalitarian cult; it might have been Scientology or Jim Jones.  In Nazi Germany it would have been the Hitlerjugend.  At Wellesley it was feminist leftism – with its rhetoric borrowed straight from the Communist Party USA. 

Betty Friedan came straight from the CPUSA, only substituting the word "women" for "Workers."  A recent article in the Atlantic makes the great confession: 

Betty Friedan was not a simple housewife driven to action by her own feelings of domestic captivity. Rather, she was a seasoned radical with years of experience in leftist politics. 

In other words, Hillary's heroine Betty Friedan was what we are now supposed to call a "community organizer."  In the 1940s and 50s, when Friedan grew up on the hard left, that term was a "Communist organizer." 

To her credit, Hillary distilled the essence of Saul Alinsky in the title of her B.A. thesis: "There is only the Fight."  Single-minded fanaticism can be very powerful.  When Hillary was betrayed time and again by Bill, she might have consoled herself with that phrase, "There is only the Fight."  When she has to be dragged bodily into her Secret Service van after collapsing, she might have thought the same thing: "There is only the Struggle."  If she is elected president three weeks from now, she will continue Obama's fanaticism, which comes down to the same thing.  Obama might call it his personal jihad.  Hillary might call it her Struggle – for women's liberation, in spite of the massive, worldwide oppression of women and children in the Muslim world. 

It's that kind of one-track fanaticism that can justify accepting millions of dollars from the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood.  It allowed Hillary to take Huma into her inner circle 20 years ago, in spite of the obvious dangers.  It explains Hillary's advocacy of the Libyan invasion – a country we had no quarrel with, and a ruler who had agreed to take down his nuclear industry.  It explains Hillary's absence on the night of Benghazi, when Ambassador Stevens and his protective detail could have been rescued but were left to die.  It even explains Hillary's sociopathic pride in the Libyan invasion, legally a crime against humanity, when she proclaimed, "We came, we saw, he died."  That refers to Moammar Gaddafi, who was killed on the street by anal impalement with a knife.  Tens of thousands of human beings have been killed in Libya since that time, for no reason at all, other than adding to Hillary's résumé.  It is a shameful disaster.  The Libyan invasion should be repudiated by all sensible Americans. 

This brings me back to our conservative Whigs, Jonah, Bill, George, and Paul Ryan.  What are they thinking?  Are they so deeply embedded in D.C. culture that they can no longer get up the elementary guts to endorse the official candidate of the Republican Party?  If that is true, then they are sacrificing their hard-earned reputations among conservatives and Republicans.  Their futures are also on the line, whether Trump wins or loses. 

We are seeing a flashpoint in the Culture War that was started by the left.  Wars separate the sheep from the goats.  Our conservative Whigs are hiding in their foxholes, thereby forfeiting their credibility forever.  But the left is hanging together – for fear of Obama's wrath, for fear of Podesta as Hillary's Enforcer, for fear of the mafia links advocated by Saul Alinsky, or maybe all of the above.  Trump is leading a true popular rising against the monopoly establishment.  Win, lose, or draw, this moment will echo down the years, and direct consequences will be felt.