Last week I was in Philadelphia as Lady Marjorie’s mom was laid to rest alongside her beloved husband and her beloved son. But afterwards, on the way to the airport, we dropped in on the new Museum of the American Revolution, and it got me to thinking.

About the pre-revolutionary situation we are in.

It didn’t hurt that I had stumbled over Arthur C. Brooks The Conservative Heart: How to build a fairer, happier, and more prosperous America. At the end of the book is some advice about how to build a social movement. Brooks lays out four steps from going “from minority to majority” and getting the power to run the table on national politics. Here is his plan:

1. Launch a rebellion
2. Declare majoritarian values
3. Claim the moral high ground
4. Unite the country behind an agenda

Now let’s compare that with the history of the American Revolution. It certainly started with a bunch of young punks launching a rebellion, on a pretty thin pretext. And it continued with an artillery battalion of propagandists, from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, declaring majoritarian values rooted in in the latest political ideas from Europe. These propagandists claimed the moral high ground and turned the heads of about one third of the colonists.

But then the real shooting started, long before the rebels “united the country behind an agenda,” and the shooting got the Brits into trouble. First, they failed to destroy Washington’s army with their 500-ship invasion force in the fall of 1776. Then they failed to prevent Benjamin Franklin from enticing France onto the rebel side. Then they got tied up in knots in the backwoods of South Carolina. Then Spain came into the war. Then the mosquitos of the tidelands won the battle of Yorktown. Then the Brits started worrying about an invasion of Britain: time for a Treaty of Paris. There’s an excellent video display in the museum that presents all these strategic issues from 1775 to 1783.

Brooks’ book was published in 2015, so he couldn’t have known what we know now -- that the liberals aren’t going to go quietly. Or maybe he did know, but was too polite to say so.

We are not going to replace the liberals as the ruling class of the United States, not without a fight. The fight may not actually descend into civil war, but it will involve a contest similar to the revolutionary war where about one third of the country will be Deplorable, one third will be lefty, and one third will be uncommitted. To build a fairer, happier, and more prosperous America, our liberal friends will have to be defeated, so that the uncommitteds will decide that they were always on our side. Yes, of course they were.

And we are starting the war with the liberals occupying the commanding heights of the academy, the schools, the movies, the museums, the legacy media, the courts, the bureaucracy, and the corporations. In addition, the kinder, gentler opposition to liberalism just collapsed with the victory of Trump. What could go wrong?

What could happen is that the liberal Deep State fails to take out Trump. The left might get lost in the weeds with its cultist LGBT crazies. The corporate chieftains might decide to hedge their bets. And a lot more Americans might come to realize that they too are Deplorables.

But most likely nothing will happen until, like the Bourbons, the ruling class starts to run out of other peoples’ money.

Meanwhile here is my plan for taking back the country.

1. Start a rebellion. We need obnoxious propagandists, people that like nothing better than to get in the faces of the liberals every day of their lives.
2. Believe in the best that has been thought and said. We do have a lot of good ideas; it’s just that we are called racists sexists and homophobes if we voice them. Hello Charles Murray.
3. When the “war” starts we need to know ourselves and know the liberals, just as Sun Tzu ordered.
4. Don’t accept battle too early. Liberals own the commanding heights and the “deep state.” General Washington won by not getting defeated in the early battles.
5. Cultivate allies. Blacks? Hispanics? Women? Do they know that liberals don’t care about them; they only care about their votes?

Okay, so that’s a start. But I think the biggest question is raised by my definition of government:

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

But how do we reward our supporters without descending into the pig-pen of free stuff and subsidies? There’s got to be a better way to reward supporters and make them glad they voted for you.

The guy that figures that out will be the man of the millennium.

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.