As everyone knows, the poet T.S. Eliot ended “The Hollow Men” poem with the following stanza:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a bureaucrat

At least that is what I thought about Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) star witnesses from the Office of Striped Pants and Fake Hair at the Department of State. Good Lord! These are the Best and the Brightest? I want my money back.

But Our Nance was shocked, shocked, at President Trump’s insult directed at the virginal Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch:

Pelosi said Trump was tweeting about Yovanovitch because “he knows -- he made a mistake, and he knows her strength, and he was trying to undermine it. Of course, presidents appoint ambassadors, but people don’t insult people, especially when they’re giving testimony before the Congress of the United States.” [my itals]

So I expect that Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) will be resigning her seat tomorrow and setting up a People Don’t Insult People Foundation to name, shame, and shun -- cancel -- anyone to the left of Stephen Miller that calls an American citizen a racist-sexist-homophobe.

Okay, I get it: when you are in the cultural catbird seat, as lefty-liberals are with monopoly domination of the media and education, your insults aren’t insults; they are measured denunciations of bad people, made more in sorrow than in anger.

Our problem is: what do we do about it? For some people, like Hunter Hearns, at American Mind, it’s already too late, for when the Dems get back in,

we will see universal healthcare, the release of violent criminals, open borders, the stamping out of religious liberty, and a government that sees its citizens less as the American founders did, and more as communist leaders who divided the population into classes of oppressors and oppressed for purposes of implementing policy.

Why? Because the liberal ruling class owns all the megaphones:

most people do not have the time, motivation or inclination to think deeply about political and social issues. They will take the opinions that have been prepared for them by higher status individuals and institutions.

Own the media and public education and you own the country.

Or maybe not. Because if you look at the performance of Rep. Schiff and the testimony of his girly bureaucrats at the State Department -- whose testimony on Trump amounts to “I Can’t Believe He Said/Did That,” a mark of the female Culture of Complaint -- you start humming a few bars of “The Hollow Men” and the world ending with a whimper.

Let’s make up a story of the modern world so far.

Back in the day, as the Industrial Revolution dawned, suggesting that the good old ways of loot and plunder had passed their sell-by date, a few visionary souls came up with the idea of limited government and the separation of powers, a cunning way of limiting the ability of pirates and politicians to loot and plunder their citizens. The first thing that happened was that people started taking a look at slavery, and getting all embarrassed about it.

But then along came a bunch of educated rich kids -- Marx & Co., followed later by Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse: rich kids all  -- who proposed to save the world with politics and activism. Their adepts created the two most savage slave states in history.

Then we had the Liberal Parents, Radical Children rich kids of the Sixties that wrecked the university. Now we have the #Resistance rich kids trying to wreck the democratic process and Extinction Rebellion rich kids trying to wreck the economy. What’s the matter with rich kids today?

And all these rich kids think that the way to heaven is through politics. Or, as Rob Henderson says, through “luxury beliefs.”

What fools they are. Why, the wisdom of the world since time began is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The way to heaven is through the limitation of politics. And this rich-kid cult worship of power has been nothing but a Great Reaction against the promise of a world that rises above crude power and subordination.

When President Trump leaves office, we will just have to take up the challenge, and teach those hollow men at the State Department and the People Don’t Insult People Foundation a lesson. As told in The Tablet, it was sociologist Émile Durkheim that had the right idea, to teach children in the schools about the glory of individual rights and the nation.

…the child, and later the adult, will learn that the rights that are granted to them, the freedom that they enjoy, the moral dignity that they believe themselves to possess, all of these are the creation… of that personal but impersonal being we call [the nation].

Imagine a media and a school system that sang that tune -- directed by high-status people like us, of course.

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.