If you are liberal and a faithful reader of The New York Times, you think that the Watergate campaign to take out President Nixon was America at its best. Imagine! A president covering up the criminal misdeeds of his underlings!

But the liberal knows that the Republican witch hunt of President Clinton was America at its worst. Here was a president that eliminated the deficit and produced the best economy in 50 years. And Republicans wanted to make it all about a blue dress.

Speaking as your average racist sexist homophobe, I’d say that the salient feature of both cooked-up scandals, no matter who was the villain and who was the innocent, was that the liberal ruling class got to impose its narrative. It wrote the history that Nixon’s peccadillos were monstrous, but that Clinton’s were not. Pretty good gig if you can get it.

Obviously liberals think that with the Mueller investigation going for a grand jury they can do a repeat of the Watergate experience and drive from office another president they hate.

Maybe they are right. But I would argue that this use of government power to harass the opposition is injustice, pure and simple, and eventually the American people will experience it as such. That wouldn’t matter, except that that’s how you get to civil war.

I talked to my Pentagon contact last week and we agreed that we are in a cold civil war. But I feel that the left and the Deep State establishment just do not appreciate how dangerous things are.

I understand why. If you read the left, you will find that its priority was and is to pursue justice, by any means necessary. That is why Marx and Engels proposed revolution, because everybody knew that the bourgeoisie would never surrender its power to the rising working class. Force was the only option.

So today’s left teaches Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls in our schools and universities that the highest form of life is to be an activist, advocating and protesting for the marginalized and oppressed.

What these Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls do not understand -- because, per Ben Rhodes, they know nothing -- is that their left-wing activism is a rehearsal of civil war. That is what marches and peaceful protests mean, that if the system doesn’t meet our non-negotiable demands we will take to the streets. But for the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls it is just what educated and evolved people do to make a better world. They are clueless about the injustice of their “peaceful protests” because the only thing they know is that good people are protesters and advocates for justice.

So the kids do their street theater, enacting their theatrical notion of #TheResistance, and the Deep State mandarins push their buttons and growl about teaching the peasants a lesson they will never forget. But they have no clue about the message they are sending out, and the message that Americans are receiving.

When you are spending 40 percent of GDP on your supporters, and burying ordinary Americans under the power of the administrative state, and your PC police make everyone fear for their job for a careless word, and when a redress of grievances cannot be obtained by ordinary legislative process, then you are heading for the moment when the racist sexist homophobes say: We Don’t Care, and we will strike back against the left and its we-get-to-protest-but-you-don’t culture.

I get what the Deep State ruling class thinks. They sent Nixon packing in the 1970s, and they stopped the evil Republicans in the 1990s, didn’t they? What’s not to like?

People keep going back to the well for water until the day it runs dry.

You can tell that the system isn’t working because of the Obamacare repeal-and-replace effort. In the best of all possible worlds, both sides would agree that Obamacare is a mess and Something Must be Done: something for Republican voters, and something for Democratic voters. But Democrats obviously think that they can stiff the Republicans, blame them for taking everyone’s health care away, and then ride to victory in the 2018 mid-terms. Democrats think that the old well is still good for another bucket of water.

See, if I were the Mr. Big of the Deep State I’d get up every morning worrying about the ignorance of my supporters arrogantly visiting injustice on the people, mindlessly stirring up a head of rebellion. I’d be careful to keep my activists in their barracks, rather than out on the streets. I’d think that the way to extend my heavenly dynasty would start with hiding my mailed fist in a velvet glove.

So I’d be very reluctant to sicc a special prosecutor on the opposition.

But what do I know?

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.