I’ve never been much of a poker player, but I understand that expert players can read the “tell” on their opponents’ faces. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the “tell” on the actions of our Democratic friends informs us that they are afraid.

Why would President Biden shovel out a boatload of executive orders in the first week of his presidency advancing climate change and fighting systemic racism?

Why would the Deep State sic the FBI on candidate and then President Trump, and then let Kevin Clinesmith, the guy that falsified a document, off with a tap on the wrist?

Why would the rulers nod and wink through a summer of riots that caused death and destruction in many American cities, and then build fences and call out the National Guard to protect them against a few “far-right” LARPers? And if that isn’t enough, mount an impeachment against a president who has already left office?

Oh, and by the way, how come it was Vice President Pence that ordered up the National Guard to Washington D.C.? Why not Trump, the commander-in-chief? Inquiring minds would like to know.

What is going on here? These “tells” show that the ruling class, for all its power and its domination and hegemony, is terrified by the barbarians at the gates.

Let us tell the recent Story of the Rulers and the Commoners. In the Fifties, the rulers built suburbs and interstates for the commoners. Then in the Sixties commoners were reviled while well-born radical children of liberal parents occupied university offices or became flower children. Then the leaders of the Silent Majority, Nixon and Agnew, were sternly shown the door. Then the Reagan Democrats elected Reagan. Then Bill Clinton was a New Democrat that worked with Republicans once the commoners voted him a Republican Congress, and all good people started to worry about the Religious Right. Then in 2006 Nancy Pelosi got a bunch of moderate Democrats elected to Congress. Then, in the 2010s, first Obama marginalized commoners as bitter clingers, sicced the IRS on the Tea Party, and then Hillary Clinton back-handed commoners as a basket of deplorables. Under Trump, commoners were derided as white oppressors. Then, January 6, 2021, a day which will live (pause) in infamy, the day the commoners suddenly became dangerous insurrectionists, and the Capitol of Panem would now be defended by fences and the National Guard.

(How does a YA writer like Suzanne Collins manage to nail our present ruling class in The Hunger Games, as Frances Hodgson Burnett did the British upper crust a century ago in The Secret Garden? Where does that come from?)

See, I think that the reality behind the poker game is this chart of U.S. government spending as a percent of GDP. It shows 80 years, from 1900 to 1980 of glorious ruling-class growth, with loot and plunder for all, punctuated by a couple of lovely wars. But since 1980, the total spending as a percent of GDP has been flat, at about 35-36 percent GDP.

Now, I don’t know what you think when you look at that chart. But I say to myself that it shows that the game is up. In whatever indirect way the American people speak, they have spoken: no more increases in government spending. But our Democratic friends propose to spend trillions on climate change and on Medicare for All, and I know not what else. And that is after all the massive spending on COVID stimulus.

Ain’t gonna fly, and that is the meaning, I think, of all the Biden executive orders. Biden’s handlers are throwing everything at the wall, hoping something will stick. I doubt it.

The problem is that USG is facing the fact of Chantrill’s Law: “government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.” Pensions? Health care? The only thing our leaders have done recently is try to squeeze in more free stuff with ObamaCare and add stealth income taxes to Medicare. Education? But our teachers don’t feel safe!

Obviously, the only way we will ever reform today’s government -- the backed-up sewer of a century of educated-ruling-class vote-buying -- is through a massive smashup. And if you ask me, the Biden agenda brings that date forward.

Now, our liberal friends can only think within their own worldview, which privileges noble educated youth fighting the oppressors for justice. But in the coming years they will find themselves tangled up in a struggle with a force that is neither revolutionary nor directed from above. The monster that devours progressivism will be an instinctual, chthonic, semiconscious rebellion from the depths of common humanity. And our liberal friends won’t have a clue what to do about it.

But at some level they know that something is wrong, that there is a glitch in the matrix. And so they are afraid. They are right to be afraid. And it shows in their actions.

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.