Sitting in the bleachers watching the Democratic presidential campaign I get the feeling that there are two religions at work among the Democratic faithful.

The first is the straight Commie religion of Bernie Sanders, that progressive dialectical geniuses will implement Everything-for-All administrative programs as far as the eye can see. It feels so good handing out benefits to the proles.

The second is the woke morality of the academy, with its intersectional preachers prophesying hell and damnation on deplorable sinners. It feels so good teaching morality to the Commoners from your social media pulpit.

Let’s give our lefty friends the benefit of the doubt.  The idea that “we” needed to provide for the workers came out of Marx’s cunning analysis of the apparent dichotomy between use value and exchange value in classical economics. In that contradiction, Marx decreed, the workers were getting screwed.

But, in another proof of God’s existence, Marx’s analysis published in Das Kapital was invalidated almost immediately by the marginal revolution of 1870 which said that all values in the market are set “at the margin” by the next sale or purchase, and economic value issues simply from the decisions of the consumers. And so our lefty friends have been science deniers ever since. Bless their hearts.

Let’s give woke morality the benefit of the doubt. It issues from notions about equality that became general in the Enlightenment, and that made a scandal of the old feudal order of rank. Now and forever we would all be equal before the law and we would all be equal in politics. Eager moralists immediately determined to conquer the world to make the world equal and punish any resisters. And create a new order of rank.

What gives me pause is that none of these fine Americans seems to have an ability to see how clueless they are.

Of Bernie-Fauxahontas and their minions, I worry about the science denial. Surely, we can all agree that pedal-to-the-metal administrative programs are not going to end well, given all the social science experiments on big government conducted on live humans (now dead) in the 20th century.

Of the wokesters, I think about other times in history when religious enthusiasts applied the maximum pressure to heretics, from the Protestant Reformation to the Frenchies’ Reign of Terror to the purges of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Surely, they should be a little embarrassed about the impact of wokester morality and cancelings on ordinary people down the ages.

But apparently these folks don’t have a care in the world. Or do they? Here is writer John Gray -- author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia  -- surveying the wreckage after Boris’s “stonking” victory in Britain.

[T]he core of the progressivist cult is the belief that the values that have guided human civilisation to date, especially in the West, need to be junked. A new kind of society is required, which progressives will devise. They are equipped for this task with scraps of faux-Marxism and hyper-liberalism, from which they have assembled a world-view. They believed a majority of people would submit to their vision and follow them. Instead they have been ignored, while their world-view has melted down into a heap of trash.

Oh dear. This is very sad. Perhaps an intervention by mental health professionals is warranted.

What do people do when their world-view has melted down into a smoldering heap of trash? I keep saying this: they don’t give up, not yet. They get all Shakespearean and bellow “once more unto the breach dear friends, once more.” Hey, how would you feel if your world-view had melted down into a heap of trash?

You would do something about it. You would order a cattle prod on Amazon and head right on down to the Capitol to prod Speaker Pelosi until she had impeached the Devil Trump and his little dog too.

You can see that this may not go well for our progressive friends. Their Everything-for-All politics may get rejected by Americans that already have everything: Social Security and health insurance and education. Their Woke Inquisition may fail to teach morality to the deplorables.

And it could get worse for the progressives.

The United States Senate may fail to remove President Trump from office; the economy may continue to grow; blacks and Hispanics may start to identify as Commoners rather than victims and re-elect President Trump. The Republicans may retake the House of Representatives.

It could well be that by December 2020 there will not be enough mental health professionals in the world to provide counseling services for all the millions of Prius and Leaf drivers that are suffering from Post Election Stress Disorder. Again.

I just have no idea what might happen next.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab (cropped)

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.