Come on, you conservatives and Trumpists.  Stop behaving like special snowflakes!  Because when you complain, "I can't believe that President Trump signed that horrible omnibus bill!," you are descending into what I call the Women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, you are going along with what German sociologist Georg Simmel predicted would be a public square with a pronounced "feminine sensibility."  The whole point of Donald Trump is that he is a man's man.  That's why so many women dislike him; that's why we voted for him.

Okay, so President Trump got out-Schumered on this one.  And the wall ain't gonna be started this year.  And Chuck's going to get his tunnel.  But do we whine about a microaggression from those mean-girl jelly-beanies on Capitol Hill, or do we suck it in and soldier on?

Hey, fellas: this was just a battle, a minor battle in the great war we are fighting against the left, the tyrannous experts, the venal politicians, and the foolish women who believe what they are taught in school.  Wanna give up already?  Or do we retreat a ways, figure out lessons learned, and regroup for the next battle?  OODA and all that?

Let's get clarity on who we are, what we want, and why we won't give up.

We are the people who are not wedded to the big state.  That means we are not the educated, who vote big government because it means jobs for educated people: doing research the government wants, working up new programs the government wants, attacking the government's opponents.  That means we are not single women, who expect the government to fill in for the absent husband.  And it means we are not the poor, who, since time immemorial, have looked to a powerful patron to provide for them.  We think society should be based on the principle of voluntary cooperation, not on a neo-feudalism of sucking up to the Big Man.

We think human society should be founded upon a moral and cultural story that promotes order but that every moment worries about order sliding toward tyranny.  We think the current political order is profoundly unjust and that, as the Chinese might say, its mandarin class has lost the Mandate of Heaven.  We think it is unjust because it is too big; unjust because it does things like education and relief of the poor that we should really do for ourselves; unjust because it has encouraged a socially destructive culture, from abortion to the sexual revolution to divorce on demand, that appeals to the worst instincts in men and is profoundly soul-destroying for women.

The most wonderful thing is that our current liberal ruling class has no notion of the injustice of its rule.  They think their "activism" is revolution from below rather than regime hate squads doing the bidding of the ruling class from above.  The people they have determined to subjugate and humiliate with their political power are men: ordinary, unexceptional men who follow the rules, go to work, and obey the laws.

Obviously, it matters not whether President Trump gets hornswoggled by a cabal of Deep State creatures, or indeed whether the Democrats manage to catch him in a perjury trap and dispatch him to Outer Slobbovia.  What matters is to continue the head of rebellion against a cruel and unjust ruling class that on the one hand allows itself every privilege and every sinecure dreamed up by the courtiers of the absolute monarchs and, on the other hand, deploys its regime hate squads throughout the land to humiliate and degrade ordinary people with the vile accusation of "white privilege."

In a recent piece, Joel Kotkin decrees the end of the neoliberal world order and proposes that its successor will be an autocratic order, made in Beijing.  But that assumes that a ruler is ruling a nation of robots moronically following orders.

On the contrary, whatever comes next will be drenched in the moral drama of good versus evil, just like the moral drama of the monotheistic religions and the modern totalitarian religions of Marx and Gramsci.

The problem of 19th-century capitalism and 20th-century conservatism is that they failed to present a moral drama that could inspire and motivate ordinary people while the left put everything in an absolutist moral frame: each of us "is either all good, or all bad" in Zman's formulation.  If you are not a woke activist, then you must be a fascist.

It is scandalous that Donald Trump, a flawed businessman, should have been the one to speak to the people in mythological terms as a national drama of good versus evil and make the ordinary American the hero and the swamp creatures the villains.

But because Trump isn't perfect, you want to give up on the whole thing?

For shame!

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.