Several conservative writers, such as Andrew Klavan, have remarked, with regret, that the folks kicking conservatives out of restaurants and movie theaters are thugs.

I'd say this was almost right.  I'd just add that the important thing to know about anyone who thinks you can bend the arc of history towards justice with politics – i.e., just about anyone on the left – is that they have already given themselves permission to become a thug.

When you believe that politics is the appropriate means to achieve everything from pensions for the elderly, health care for all, and education for little children to establishment of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, you are saying that force is the means to achieve this.

And the right?  Well, let us agree that when the left accuses the right of excessive force – e.g., with poor little kiddies separated from parents on the border – we get embarrassed and try to explain ourselves.  No one among Antifa or the SJW rank and file is the least bit embarrassed about the use of force in their peaceful protests.  Because they are thugs.

Let us quiz our lefty friends on their thuggish faith using the interrogatory method of British Channel Four's Cathy Newman.  The subject is "my favorite Four Maxims."

Government is force.  So you are saying ordinary people are too stupid to save for retirement?  So you are saying that women, who believe in health care like a religion, are not going to figure out how to manipulate the world into providing them with the full amount of health care they have in mind?  I got a bridge to sell you.

Politics is division.  So you are saying that the only way to get anything done in this world is to divide people up into tribes and get them to hate on each other?  So you are saying the modern tribe of the nation is no good, and you want to return to the ancient tribal politics of race and religion?  I got a bridge...

System is domination.  So you are saying that the best way to organize the delivery of products and services is through the hierarchical method of a big boss allocating resources through his thug lieutenants in the administrative bureaucracy?  I got a Strzok...

There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.  So you are saying government power, which has spawned injustice again and again down the ages, is just the thing to set everything to rights, forever and ever?

She has quite a way with words, that Cathy Newman.

When you view the world with the creative stage lighting of my Four Maxims, it makes complete sense that lefties have resorted so easily, for the last century, to hate and violence.  If you believe in politics as salvation, you believe in force and hate.

When you elevate "activism" and "peaceful protest" into the noblest thing a young person can do with xir young life, you are elevating politics and the street show of force into something noble.  In fact, of course, politics and protests are best thought of as necessary evils, a way to keep the passions of haters and thugs in safe channels.

But our lefty friends are clueless about all this.  They only know what they have been carefully taught in Activism 101.

Sometimes a lefty gets a glimmering of understanding.  At the end of his Leon Trotsky, lefty icon Irving Howe allows that maybe the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 was not such a good idea, because it reduced everything in Russia to force and power, and maybe Trotsky almost began to appreciate that after he had been kicked out of power by the kindly Stalin.

Or Nietzsche, who celebrates the good old days of hate and creative torture brought to an end by the "priests" who taught humans to turn their natural and healthy tribal hate back on themselves with the idea of Original Sin.  Hey, lefties!  Let's healthily hate on the president's press secretary when she goes out to dinner!

I am very philosophical about all this.  It makes sense that, before humans finally ascend to the sunlit uplands of true voluntary cooperation under the emergent phenomenon of the price system on the first flight to Mars, we would order a final delivery of neo-slavery with the government taking 35 cents on every dollar we earn, plus the neo-feudalism of the lord of the Deep-State manor ordering us how to educate our children, plus the neo-tribalism of identity politics having one last college try at the hating and fearing game, with free shipping on Prime Day.

And it also makes sense that the folks holding those fake protest signs these days all seem to be Good Little College Girls.  In my racist, sexist, homophobic world, it is always the women that are the last to get it.

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.