If you haven't noticed in the last week or so, our liberal friends seem to have taught just about every young head full of mush how to do "protest."  In the liberal universe, activism and protest are the highest forms of human social interaction.  When liberals enact a day of marches, or a town hall full of baying students, this is seen by all as a triumph of the progressive will and faithfully recorded by our modern Leni Riefenstahls.

But is it really such a good idea?  Is all this activism really going to lead to fundamental transformation?  Suppose it leads to a backlash.

"Backlash," by the way, is a term liberals invented back in the '60s to stigmatize average Americans who really didn't like what the Kids and their Movement and their Protests were doing to America.  When you go to Wikipedia, you find that they are a bit vague about it all.  I wonder why.

Over at American Greatness, Mytheos Holt notes that there is a gaping hole at the middle of the current liberal #Resistance.  The Resistance is all about complaint; there is no attempt to paint a glorious picture of what the #Resistance will bring to America.  Yes, I wonder why.

Could it be that the left really doesn't have vision of paradise – only a mechanical notion of doing activism, any activism, in the blind faith that the arc of history will bend toward justice?  It wouldn't be the first time that a religion regressed into mindless ritual without thinking about what it all means.

How should we understand the quandary of our liberal and progressive friends?  I'd say their problem is that, according to them, nothing has changed.

The left has spent 150 years advocating for the workers, and guess what: a job is still a job.  Moreover, it doesn't do to look too carefully at the results of all that pro-labor legislation.  It priced workers in heavy industry out of a job, and now it is bankrupting state and local government.

The left has spent 70 years advocating for women and minorities, and guess what: women and minorities are still hardest hit, even though the landmark legislation banning racial and sexual discrimination was passed 50 years ago.  How could this be?  What kind of vile cisgendered white male conspiracy could make women less happy than they were in the 1950s and make minorities eternally outraged that the cops were cracking down on their home-grown thugs and murderers?  This is all supposed to be the fault of white supremacists.  But if we are all gap-toothed Alt-Right über-fascistic neo-Nazis, how could we possibly succeed in our evil plan against the evolved, educated, activist, woke progressives and their willing kiddies?

The answer is staring us in the face.  It is that the leftist movement is a Great Reaction back to the past, with its identity politics a neo-tribalism and its welfare state a neo-feudalism.  No wonder everything the left has focused on has turned to stone.  Its ideas and its methods are a return to the grueling days of top-down agricultural hegemony, the era of misery and recurring famines that the ruling-class priesthood thoughtfully attributed to acts of God.

These days, our secular priests in the media blame ruling class failures on the National Rifle Association and modern trends in the design of hunting rifles.

Well, I wish the diviners would look up from their tea leaves and divine this.  How come after all the activism that was put into the working class over the last century, it is dying of despair in the United States?

How come after all the activism in favor of women, they are miserable, and how come blacks are angry, and falling behind other minorities like the Mexicans, who seem to be the only guys building condos and apartments here in Seattle, and the South and East Asians, who are racing to the top of tech?

How could this be?  How could all the activism and all the protest and all the comprehensive and mandatory legislation require the activists to escalate their non-negotiable demands and encourage their willing accomplices in social media to de-platform anyone who doesn't agree with them?

How come all the administrative state entitlement programs designed and administered by experts and academics are broke, and the educational programs are buried under a bramble of administrative incompetence?

No wonder our progressive friends are switching into witch-hunting mode, lashing out at individual citizens and voluntary associations of patriotic citizens.  It cannot be true, it must not be true that the politics and the activism of the global educated elite are an utter failure.

Really, if our rulers and their supporters were not such a threat to our lives and our jobs and our sacred honor, we could just sit back and laugh at their pathetic antics.

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.