Just imagine if a coalition of Second Amendment groups had barracked a pre-inauguration gala at the second Obama inauguration.

Yet even FoxNews radio soothingly reported the Inauguration Day protests against President Trump by a coalition of leftist activist groups as “mostly peaceful.” Yeah. Imagine if my imaginary Second Amendment guys protesting President Obama had been merely “mostly peaceful.”

Imagine what the Fake News guys at CNN would have said about that.

I am here to say that the whole “activism” culture of the left is a crock and a profound betrayal of the whole modern culture of changing governments through the sham fights of elections rather than the real fight of civil war.

And under universal suffrage, nobody is outside the system; everyone has a vote.

Back in the day, before the workers got the vote, the only way they could get the attention of the ruling class was to march and to riot. But now the ruling class cares about the poor: they have the vote.

A couple of years ago I audited a philosophy course on David Hume at the University of Washington. One of the good little girls in class defined politics as marching to City Hall. Really, I thought? Who is teaching her that?

Because people that have the vote don’t need to protest and call for bloody revolution. The proof is that the Marxists had to issue an update to their street revolution app.

By World War I, the once-revolutionary workers had all become good Germans and good Brits, and so the political software engineers at Frankfurt issued Marxism 2.0, changing class politics to identity politics.

Activism, or today’s conceit of “resistance,” is rich kids acting out. It is rich kids pretending to protest for the marginalized and oppressed. Really, it is rich kids playing at being the oppressed.

How about the global women’s march this last weekend? Compare the women you saw on the march with the women you saw at Trump’s inauguration: upscale privileged women versus ordinary Americans.

Or climate. The climateers are always demonstrating and protesting. Why? They are already powerful and already have the ear of the ruling class. Oh wait, they are the ruling class.

What do you call a protest of the already powerful? You call the protest regime intimidation, and you call the protesters regime thugs.

And the left has been doing this for 170 years. Marx and Engels? Rich kids. Horkheimer and Adorno? Rich kids. Herbert Marcuse? Rich kid. Bill Ayers? Son of Commonwealth Edison CEO.

Now these chaps could have done what Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers did. They could have taken Daddy’s money and made it bigger, creating jobs and wealth and all.

But there is a problem with that. Business is very hard work, and risky too. What if the rich kids lost all of Daddy’s money and had to work for a living?

Much better get down for the struggle in the streets and burn a bit of George Soros’ money, or a bit of income from the family trust. No worries, no responsibility, no potential downside.

The genius of our lefty friends is to have taken the age-old desperate rage of the excluded and made it into an instrument of state power. The “peaceful protest” has become a club with which the educated and powerful cudgel the ordinary citizen into silence. If you oppose the billionaire-supported Black Lives Matter riots you are a racist supporting police violence. If you sit next to a liberal woman from Seattle on an airplane, she will treat you like a deplorable. If you oppose the endless climate protests, you want to fry the planet.

It’s brilliant: to use the travails of the inner city, the conceits of up-scale women, the salvation of the world as arguments for more power to the powerful, to transform the cry of the powerless into the routine projection of ruling-class thuggery.

But it is vile.

It is vile because it takes the desperate cry of the unprotected and transforms it into merely another tool of the powerful.

It is vile because it violates the modern social contract, that you put your weapons away and submit with a good grace to the decision of the ballot box, even if you don’t like the result.

It is vile because it suppresses the real voices of the forgotten ones, and substitutes in their place the canned voices of the ruling class’s little darlings.

The nation has been groaning for an end to the hegemony of rich-kid lefty activists, and it looks like we found just the guy to charge “mostly peaceful” protesters with felony rioting, and to tell the privileged women of America that we just had an election.

Two years ago, who would have thought it possible?

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.