After reading about the shabby effort to advance the impeachment of President Trump over the last two weeks I think it is time for a civics lesson.

Maybe that is necessary because they don’t teach civics in the schools and universities anymore. They teach social justice. And kids today need to advertise their social justice activism if they want to get into the Tiger Moms’ favorite universities.

Let us have a quick refresher on civics.

Our Founders lived in a time that worried about kings and religion. As rich commoners they wanted to curb the power of kings and nobles, and they knew from the experience of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War that religion and politics were a lethal combination.

The Founders thought that if you wanted to avoid kings overdoing their appetite for loot and plunder and religious fanatics overdoing their appetite for moral rectification you needed to separate the powers of the world. Their idea was to start with separating political powers, so that no single king or politician could concentrate all the powers of the state to himself. As Montesquieu said: I have a plan for that.

Then the Founders decided in the First Amendment to prevent a state church, to make it a little more difficult to “legislate morality.” Legislating morality is a moral imperative when Our Guys do it; it is a crime against humanity when the Other Guys do it.

Of course, anyone with a totalitarian appetite to change the world, whether left or right, finds the separation of powers to be a useless and “obsolete” appendage, according to Jean-François Revel. On the contrary, he writes in The Totalitarian Temptation, the separation of powers

...is extremely difficult to maintain, it requires a high level of civic consciousness and despite its age it remains the basis of every democracy.

Oh! You mean that the ruling class should teach the kiddies all about the Constitution, the separation of powers, and all that dead white male stuff?

But none of the Founders’ ideas can work if people think the system is all stitched up by the Other Guys. When people think that the system is closed to them they start to think about rebellion.

The nub of the matter, described by strategist -- that’s a guy that thinks he can see around corners -- William S. Lind (H/T Vox Day). is “legitimacy.” And it works both ways.

There is no question many on the Left regard President Trump as illegitimate. Should a hard-Left figure such as Warren win in 2020, the Right will doubt her legitimacy.

Okay, it’s fine that people whine about the other guys. But the fact is that “President Trump’s supporters regard his election as proof their voices can be heard, that their interests will be considered in Washington.”

Suppose that President Trump is removed from office and a President Warren is elected in 2020?

At that point, in the vast electoral sea that is red America, the legitimacy of the system itself, i.e., the state, will be brought into serious question. And when that happens, the chance of Fourth Generation war here on a large scale will rise dramatically. When you tell people they cannot achieve representation through ballots, they start to think about doing it with bullets.

If you have an education in civics you are halfway to understanding the point of the Constitution, of separation of powers, of alternation in office, not because they are good in themselves, but because they encourage people to resolve their differences with ballots not bullets, or at least wait till it is “their turn.”

Do you get the feeling that our “woke” friends, the kind that have been saying #ByeByeElise, have absolutely no clue about this?

Of course not, because nobody on the Democratic side has been telling the “woke” kiddies that the way to get rid of Trump is to appeal to the American people and beat him fair and square at the ballot box.

Instead they prefer the shortcut: impeachment. There was the Nixon effort; the Reagan Iran-Contra effort; the Trump collusion-Ukraine effort. Then there were the elections that the Democratic candidate failed to concede: Gore in 2000, and Clinton in 2016.

It’s tempting to think they do this because they are evil, but I rather think it is because they are stupid: fin de siècle idiots that don’t know any better.

If the Democrats impeach and remove Donald Trump and then elect Elizabeth Warren in 2020, do they not see that the people that voted for Donald Trump will think they have nothing left to lose?

No. They really don’t. Because they were so busy building a social justice portfolio for their college applications that they never took any classes in civics.

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.