A couple of weeks ago I noted how your average ruling class “gotta have a war.” And I was right. But, now I am thinking: “how do we play that game?”

“We” means everyone from ordinary deplorables to the charming 19-year-old Sikh-Canadian Rav Arora.

Expressed more politely, “gotta have a war” issues from my Maxim that “The only warrant for government power is existential peril,” whether the peril is Nazis, Commies, mullahs, white supremacists -- or climate change. First you gotta have a peril, then you gotta have a war, then you got the glorious political power that was your goal in the first place.

Whatabout a War on Woke? Maybe, but at this stage of the game I can’t get myself to thinking of the wokerati as Evil. I think of them rather as fools and knaves, stupidly parroting the sacred “narrative” of the priests in the academy. And I put upper-class white women with the #WeBelieve signs in their yards in the same category: fools and knavettes.

Whatabout a War on the Climatistas? Good idea, but I’m afraid its time has not yet come. We must wait until the economy has been wrecked by climate nonsense, and Ford F-150 drivers have got the bloodlust in their eyes.

Whatabout a War on China? You mean like the two wars we fought in the 20th century to keep the Germans down? So now we’ll delay China’s global dominance by 50 years, assuming that our brilliant strategy doesn’t backfire and hasten Chinese dominance?

We could adapt the lefties’ moral framework of “oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors.” The lefties represent that the war of the ages is between the white oppressors and their helpless victims, the oppressed peoples. And then along come the progressive and evolved “allies” to help the helpless oppressed peoples. No haters among the allies, no sir!

But we know that the real moral outrage out there is lefty political power and the human rubble left over from a century of the left’s failed government programs. Then the real war is between evil liberal oppressors and helpless liberal victims.

But how are noble conservative helpers going to help the helpless liberal victims? The victims don’t think they need any help; they are getting loot and plunder from the liberals and think that the best in life is for their liberal leaders to ante up more loot and plunder, even as it decimates their lives and communities.

So a moral framework of “human rubble, helpers, and lefty power addicts” ain’t gonna fly.

We are back to Trump’s national populism: drain the swamp. And that might become more difficult in the future, if one result of Trumpism is to create a heightened class consciousness among the educated Gentry, a belief that national populism would reduce the prospects for “ambition, honor, and vanity” in the credentialed class. Guess what: it would!

But still, we gotta fight: there is no way past the fact that there is something deep down in men that wants to slay the dragon.

Conversely, there is something deep down in women that wants to signal virtue.

So how do we invent a society in which politics and activism are for low-rent deplorables rather than for well-credentialed graduates of selective colleges, where the way that you cover yourself with honor is not from politics but something else, something else that is full of danger and challenge and risk and the probability of failure, but still every young man lines up to take his chance?

Hey, I know. How about we say that politics and activism are for women, given that in our day politics and activism are 97 percent virtue-signaling and the Age of Revolution, the day when you could get killed for your politics, is over.

But that still leaves the problem of men. We men need danger, risk, and standing in line under fire with our brothers; otherwise we go to the dogs, as soyboys and pajama-boys.

Or maybe the man of the future is the “pure fool” like Wagner’s Parsifal. Here is the blurb from Roger Scruton’s last book, Wagner’s Parsifal.

For Wagner, redemption occurs in this life, when compassion prevails over enslavement, and purity replaces spiritual pollution. His music here ties together suffering and contrition, sin and forgiveness, downfall and redemption in an inextricable knot, healing the fractures and uniting the warring elements in human life in a way that is clear, convincing and uncanny.

Yes. What does that mean when it’s at home? Could it be that the answer to the question of our time is a collision between the archetype of the brave warrior and the archetype of the “pure fool?”

But there would still be a ruling class, and my guess is that they would still be up to no good.

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.

Image: Daily Worker