Who can forget the wise words of President Eisenhower:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the protest-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Alas, it is the way of humans to forget the wise words of their ancestors.

But how did this happen? How did our society get captured by a brutal and oppressive protest industrial complex? Ernest Hemingway knew: “How did you go woke? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

I blame Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. It was the flooding of Europe with cheap books replacing expensive parchment scrolls that prompted the rise of the educated class and led to the Age of Revolution. But then what? What happened after the educated class came to power in the 19th century?

The answer comes from Gaetano Mosca, member of the Italian school of elitism, and his book The Ruling Class. Ruling classes do not rule by power alone, he wrote, but invent a moral or legal basis for their power. Mosca called this a “political formula.”

Rulers never say: “I’m in it for me; get used to it, peasant.” Oh no. They are always serving the people, or the nation.

Our present rulers justify their power with their advocacy for marginalized communities and their benign support of movements of the oppressed demonstrating for justice.

But when did it start? With Babeuf, after the French Revolution? Saint-Simon, advocating for the needs of the industrial class? Fourier and his Phalanstères? Marx and his communism that would stop the “immiseration” of the workers?

Never mind: by the end of the 19th century all the right people were agreed that the way to raise up the workers was by pulling down the robber barons.

However, a curious thing happened on the way to the just society. In the cities of the United States, social scientists like William M. Tweed discovered that the lower class identified not so much by class as by race and national origin. So the educated class adapted its class ideology into an ethnic ideology.

That worked like gangbusters when it was time for the Democrats to dump the Southern white trash and fight for black civil rights and smash the racist regime of Jim Crow.

But now I have to tell you a sad story. At some point in the aftermath of the movement for black civil rights, the mass movement of educated people fulfilled Eric Hoffer’s prophecy and became a racket.

Welcome to the Age of the Fake Victim, where the victims hail not from the suffering lower classes, but from the tippy-top educated class.

Seriously, can you blame our liberal friends? After a century and more of helping up the helpless, it was time to deal a few cards to themselves.

So our feminist friends, particularly educated-class women, decided they were victims. But I say they never were.

Likewise, gays have only experienced modest victimhood. Pride.com mentions the following gay Hollywood actors: Marlene Dietrich, Cesar Romero, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Rock Hudson, Tallulah Bankhead, etc. Wow, imagine how they suffered!

And transgenders? The only people suffering on the transgender front seem to be women: on the sports field, in the public restroom, and J.K. Rowling.

When you think about it, it makes complete sense. Of course, our liberal friends would eventually decide that they were the real victims!

But the really delicious thing about fighting for the victims is you get to make like a rioter.

All down the ages, we are assured, helpless victims, faced with utter destitution, were forced to riot in the streets. The Jacquerie, the Fronde, The Vendée, The Luddites, the Swing riots, the Whiskey rebellion. What fun they had! Why shouldn’t lefty students get in on the action!

Back in the day, upper-class youth put on fancy uniforms and flourished sabers and came home as war heroes. Why shouldn’t today’s tippy-top youth at least wear fashionable keffiyeh scarves just like genuine freedom fighters!

Of course, experts agree, all such protests are completely different than the January 6 armed insurrection, a day that will live in infamy.

The last time we had genuine protests for genuine victims was the civil rights era. And I am sure that those Freedom Rider activists had no interest in teaching southern white trash a lesson.

I feel a certain compassion for today’s tippy-top elite students. All their lives they have been carefully taught that the only way to live a meaningful life is as an Ally of the Oppressed against the White Oppressors -- or white racists, or imperialists, or settler-colonialists, or however the fashion changes. So what else can they do?

Last week, it seemed that America’s frat boys had had it with the keffiyeh fashion show. I wonder who wins in the battle of Fratties vs. Wokies?

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: Ted Eytan