My man Kevin D. Williamson is worried that the Republican Party has nothing to say to blue states like California and New York and that the party feels pretty good about it.  But such an approach leads to disaster, he says:

Writing off half of the country as a lost cause is bad for the Republican soul.  It also will prove bad for Republican electoral prospects, in time.

Well, yes.  On a tactical level, it is important to have something to say to the blue cities and not to write them off as Deplorables.  But that is to miss the wood for the trees.

The reason why California and New York are blue bastions is simple.  On the one hand, all the upper-income residents went to secular seminary and either learned to believe what they were taught or pretend they did.  On the other hand, the immigration policy of 1965 has filled the cities with people that are just off the farm.  They think and act as peasants and serfs, just as the Irish and the Italians did in the late 19th century.

If we want to revive GOP fortunes in the great cities, we are going to do it not by catering to upper-class conceits or lower-class tribalism.  That will only put off the Day of Judgment.  What we need to do get the upper class recoiling in revulsion from lefty culture.  And we need to slowly and incrementally reform the welfare state so that it guides the New Immigrants into the middle-class culture of work and marriage and responsibility.

I do not see how this can be done without a full-on culture war to tu rn the elites from their cowardly kowtow to the left's cultural mandarins. We need to create an America where everyone knows in his bones that the only "haters" in sight are lefty activists.

As for the New Immigrants, I refer you to the welfare reform of 1996.  Liberals said it would be the end of the world; instead, the welfare recipients calmly went out and got jobs.

But how do we make cultural war on the elites and cure them of their conceit?  Perfectly simple: We declare war on the culture of "activism."

I admit to being something of a dull dog about this for most of my life until the day a liberal friend told me she had always wanted "to get into activism."

Lefty "activism" is the central Problem of Our Time, that Good Little Girls from good families are raised and educated to think that marchin' and protestin' are the means to bend the arc of history toward justice.  Too many Good Little Boys think that, too.  Little girls and boys are carefully taught that, but for wage and hour laws, civil rights laws, and social insurance, ordinary people would be living in grinding poverty subject to ruthless industrial discipline and racist and patriarchal oppression.  Thus, upper-class kids are doing the "peaceful protest" thing on campus, complete with bullhorns and signs and chants, as the new normal carefully taught by our lefty teachers and administrators.

The Good Little Boys had a point 170 years ago.  Of course, the new capitalists would replace the feudal lords; of course, the proletarians would replace the feudal serfs as helpless victims.  Everybody knew that.  That's how the dance of power works, according to ancient wisdom and according to Good Little Boy Marx and Good Little Boy Engels.

Only they were wrong. That's because the capitalists were not that interested in power.  Oil guy Rockefeller retired at age 50 and invented modern philanthropy.  Steel guy Carnegie built libraries and a peace foundation.  Imagine regular politicians like Chuck and Nancy doing that!

In my view, the story of the last two hundred years is that "power" is a dead end, and the horrors of everything from communism to Bolivarianism prove it.  "Price" and "markets" are much better; they get people to peacefully work for each other's benefit.  But, as with any great transformation, there are those who are desperate to prove that nothing has changed and that only with power can the human race be saved.  Only through activism, the activists tell us, will we save the lost souls, workers, minorities, women, immigrants, Muslims!  Because white privilege.

Lefties make a big deal of railing at militarism, imperialism, and colonialism.  Good point, and the long 19th century was a global experiment to prove that militarism, imperialism, and colonialism were a waste of time and money – and lives.

I have a better idea: that "activism" is a disaster that creates violence and misery wherever it is tried.

It is up to us to teach the educated elite, and every silly peaceful protester, that "activism" is a vile superstition.  Only then will they all instinctively rush to identify with the Republican Party.

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.