There was a clunkiness about Touchy Joe’s invocation of Charlottesville on his presidential announcement day. For Joe, it seems, the hordes of hooded white nationalists are about to debouch out of the Appalachians and do whatever it is that people previously dispatched to the margins do when they debouch.

Of course, when that Literally-Hitler leads the deplorables out of the hills he will no doubt have read all the books banned by Amazon and the websites downlisted by Google. Because anything banned by Amazon and Google must say something that the deep state doesn’t want you to know.

It has been a great gig, the royal road to political power over the last 150 years. It’s the ideology of the traitor to his class. The rich haute bourgeois kids of the 19th century invented the role, beating up the bourgeoisie to rile up the workers. In the 20th century, rich white kids reprised the role, beating up whites all the better to rile up the blacks, beating up men all the better to rile up women.

I have a question. Why haven’t we trained up a slugger to hit this stuff right out of the ballpark? As in:

“Hey Joe, why don’t you hit on someone your own size? How about you bravely take out after the real threat to peace and domestic tranquillity, the thugs of AntiFa?

“Let’s see, Joe. Back in the day, the street thugs of the Democratic Party wore white flowing robes. Today they come all arrayed in artistic black. Yeah, Joe-ker, riddle me this: how come artists just love wearing artistic black?

“Back in the day, Joe, the street thugs of the Democratic Party wore white hoods. Now they wear black masks and helmets. Where were you, Joe, expressing your outrage at this illegal and hateful behavior? Back in the day, Joe, the street thugs of the Democratic Party terrified people with burning crosses. Now they do it with bike locks. Hey Joe! When are you gonna call for bike-lock control!”

Surely, this is not that hard.

Instead, we white male deplorables are frozen like deer in the headlights against the vile racist sexist smears of the glitterati. And Touchy Joe.

Now I agree with our liberal friends that there is no such thing as race. That is to say that all identities in politics are fake tribes gussied up by politicians to create and Us and Them narratives.

The hunter gatherers didn’t have tribes; they had bands in which everyone was related by blood. Tribalism didn’t start until people started living in settlements large enough that not everyone was known to everyone else and not everyone was related by blood. That’s when humans decided that people that looked and thought like Us belonged to Our Tribe, and people that didn’t look and think like us were the Enemy Tribe. In other words, every tribe is a fake tribe, conjured up for political purposes.

The way to the future is to reject the Us and Them categories that our liberal friends have conjured up and insist on using our categories. We must learn to dominate the culture with our categories: our fake tribes against their fake tribes.

Let us celebrate our National tribe against their Globalist tribe. Globalism is a fantasy that won’t be realized until we are threatened by an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Meanwhile America against the world is a pretty good corner to defend. The same goes for Nation against Identity, whether race, sex, non-binary, or lefty woke-ism. Nation is glorious and inclusive; lefty identities are mean and hateful. Then there is Capitalism versus Socialism: prosperity, suburbs, SUVs against poverty, labor camps, and hunger. What about our Families versus their Relationships? Love, commitment and babies against miserable hook-ups and abortions and hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woke-woman-scorned. Then there is our glorious Free Speech versus their mean and vile Deplatforming Censorship.

There is a temptation to blame our conservative and GOP leaders for failing to stand up for us, but I remember thinking at the end of the Reagan era that of course the Democrats would see the errors of their ways, and embrace, at least, the obvious success of supply-side economics. And, of course, they pretended to do that for a season with President “the era of big government is over” Clinton.

Anyway, now we have President Trump, who told the folks in Green Bay on Saturday that “The Republican Party is the party of the American worker, the American family, and the American Dream!" And he told them that the Democratic Party was the party “of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, hoaxes and delusions."

My kinda guy!

I have a dream, that one day America will celebrate the right to a faith other than the ruling class’s state religion; that colleges will practice robust, manly debate; that schools will raise up the poor.

But first we fight.

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