Let's get one thing out of the way. There was no cheating by Democrats in 2020 and 2022. No Siree, and if you suggest such a thing, you are nothing but an extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist. And watch it, because FBI informants… know-what-I-mean.

After the fun of the post-election week, let's describe U.S. politics this way. We conspiratorial insurrectionists believe that the rulers are trying to hide their failures with racist-sexist-homophobe pejoratives and a world war on climate. It's just like FDR nattering on about economic royalists and pushing for war in the late 1930s to save Democrats from the fallout of his failed New Deal.

It's always the same: crank up the pejoratives and start a world war. That's what you do when you are failing.

Let's go bigger: I maintain that the entire rule of the educated class for the last 100 years is a failure -- and an oppression.

The educated class said they cared about the workers. But they let the workers price themselves out of the market with labor unions, and now the midwestern industrial heartland is a Rust Belt.

You did it, liberals.

The educated class said they cared about the Negroes. But they swaddled them in welfare so that, by 2010, 72 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock vs. whites at 36 percent. Eeevil Jim Crow segregationists couldn't have cooked up a better way to wreck black Americans.

You did it, liberals.

The educated class said they cared about women: liberate them from the patriarchy. What happened to that? Today most women have to work for the Man, just to bring in the groceries and to pay for their college. And they are expected to "put out," in the memorable phrase of Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire. And, in return for "putting out," our modern women get to abort their babies, as the mood takes them. I bet they feel liberated about that. Result: women aren't as happy as in the patriarchal Fifties.

You did it, liberals.

The educated class said they were going to protect old age with Social Security. But Americans don't own their Social Security. It's not a savings program but an income transfer program. So low- and middle-income Americans don't get to accumulate capital that they could pass on to their children. They only get to hang on the gubmint tit, hoping that it doesn't run out of milk before they die.

You did it, liberals.

The educated class, determined to help Americans own homes, created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 1930s to provide a secondary mortgage market. But instead of letting the market decide, they decided to permit 30-year fixed-rate mortgages and low-down mortgages to "help" people. Only, of course, the result has been to send home prices into the stratosphere. And the 2008 Great Recession brought to you by little Ben Bernanke, who forgot that the whole point of the Federal Reserve System is to be the "lender of last resort." Today young people need to be high-paid woke tech workers in order to be able to afford a home.

You did it, liberals.

The educated class decided to help students pay for university education with student debt. So universities hired a bunch of administrators and cranked up the tuition. Now a whole generation of young people is drowning in debt.

You did it, liberals.

In general, in the last century or so, when an educated ruling class screws up it blames enemies. In the French Revolution, in 1793, with the Teutonic Prussians and Austrians threatening from the East and the medieval Vendéan peasants in the West, the educated students of Rousseau decided that the thing to do was to kill all the traitors with a nice surgical Reign of Terror. In the Soviet Union, after the failure of his first Five Year Plan, Joe Stalin decided to kill all the saboteurs and wreckers, just to be safe. In the People's Republic of China after the failure of his Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong decided to launch a cultural revolution to "sweep away all monsters and demons" of the Four Olds. In our country, after the failure of just about every liberal program of the last century, our rulers have decided that Americans should be punished for mis- dis- or mal-information and that speakers at college diverging from the ruling-class line should be canceled. And if you disagree you are a right-wing extremist.

Now, I want to make it perfectly clear that in no way, No Siree, have our Democrat friends cheated in elections. Nobody but an armed insurrectionist or an extremist opponent of "our democracy" would make such an absurd accusation.

But when things start to go wrong for a ruling class, it usually starts to bear down on its subjects. And when things start to go really wrong, the ruling class bears down even harder.

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: Rijksmuseum